If nothing else, the official wedding was a bonanza for hair salons, dress shops, and the social press. Though it wasn’t that long ago, in these days of failed banks and financial disaster at every hand, it seems like an event from the last days of Pompeii, but at the human level it was a complete success in the one way that mattered most, at least to me: Belinda loved every minute of it.
We made a new dress for her in navy satin that was actually in two pieces, to allow for the tubes from her side that were permanently draining into a pair of sacs she called Harold and Maude. Mrs. Oba made a matching bag for them held with a broad satin strap that crossed her now tiny rib cage diagonally like a military sash. It was decorated with large grosgrain roses that concealed almost perfectly its actual function. Belinda walked up the aisle to her seat on the arm of Nicky’s friend Toby, resplendent in his swallowtail coat, with her cane swathed in ribbons that matched her dress, her well-coiffed head bobbing with effort on her long neck while she smiled proudly at beaming friends on both sides of the aisle. It was the last time she walked in public. After the ceremony she allowed herself to be moved into a wheelchair, but from it she enjoyed the dinner, the toasts, the couple’s “first dance,” and the cutting of the seven-tier wedding cake covered with marzipan doves.
Belinda did not leave her bed again for days afterward. Then she seemed to recover, and we eased into foolish hope. But in March she had a terrifying bout of rigor shakes—do you know the term? It rhymes with tiger and it’s shattering, caused by the kind of infection you get when your immune system is on the mat and about to be counted out. That put her back in the hospital for weeks, after which, though she lived almost to the end of the year, she was in the hospital more than she was out of it.
One morning in early April, Belinda’s housekeeper, who was Peruvian and took care of her with as much slavish devotion as if Belinda were the Great Inca, called me at the shop. Her English was not good, so this was an act of particular courage for her.
“Missus Lovie . . .” Ursula always sounded as if she might burst into tears if she had to attract personal notice to herself in any way.
“Good morning, Ursula. Is Mrs. Binney all right?”
“Yes, missus. No, missus. She is in the slammer, Missus Lovie.” She uttered this without irony, as it was the way Belinda referred to the hospital. “She wants a banana smoothie, missus, and I don’t know, and Missus Avis is not at home . . .”
“Thank you so much for telling me, Ursula. I can take that right to her now.”
“Oh, thank you, Missus Lovie!” You’d have thought I had personally averted the death of the sun, or the need for her to cut her own heart out on some high stone altar. I bustled uptown in foul raw weather and waited in the lunch rush line at the shop near the hospital that Belinda favored. When I placed my order, the counterman said that he had no bananas and was annoyed when I wouldn’t order something else. I struck back out into the drizzle and wind and walked until I found a bodega, bought a bunch of bananas, went back, and handed them to the counterman. It was worth it: Belinda in her high narrow room was delighted with the story and sang to me, “Yes, we have no bananas . . .” a song that she claimed had greatly amused her father. It was a good day for her, and I stayed quite a while as she told me stories of her childhood in Dover, Ohio, where her parents had owned a hardware store.
It is my observation that the people who enjoy money the most are the ones who weren’t born with it. For the congenitally rich, money creates a kind of cage, a structure of manners and expectations they don’t dare question, because if they do they might discover they don’t know who they are. For our classmates at school it was the water they swam in, isolating them in ways they sometimes never understand. But the money she’d married, then cleverly managed into a sizable pile, changed Belinda from a quietly pretty girl in rural Ohio to the Great Inca of New York City, and she enjoyed every cent of it because she never lost the memory of what it was not to have it. Not that she hadn’t enjoyed her simple childhood; she had, very much. That was her true distinction, not the money. The capacity to enjoy and appreciate what she had, whatever it was.
What she had now was time, measured no longer in vats or even gallons but teaspoons. Her response to her death sentence was to resolve to live every moment she had left impeccably. Never to rage or blame, never to feel that her minutes mattered more than other people’s, never to presume that her needs and wishes weighed more than theirs did. A hospital like MSK is filled with patients so frightened and angry at their fates that they attack even those trying hardest to help them. No wonder Belinda was a favorite there. I saw her undone only once in all the time I spent with her in the hospital; we were downstairs in Imaging, where she was waiting for some kind of test for which they were dripping fluid into an internal organ—we didn’t discuss which one. She sat in her wheelchair in the hallway with her metal tree beside her hung with bags attached to tubes attached to Belinda at various points on her body. I sat beside her, telling her some tale I had heard at the shop. Her face was gradually clouding with distress, and I didn’t know what to do. Go on chattering? Scream for help? At last she interrupted me. When I got back to her with a nurse in tow, he blanched to see how much liquid had left whichever bag it was, blowing up something inside Belinda to the point of unbearable pressure on some, I suppose, sphincter. I rolled the intravenous tree behind her as he rushed the wheelchair down the hall, knocking on doors to bathrooms. I thought he might burst into one and pull whoever was in there off the can, but he found an empty one, and the two of them disappeared inside.
When she was returned to me, Belinda’s lashes were wet with tears. She looked at me with a face for once empty of cheer and said in a tiny voice, “You can’t imagine the indignities.” It was true, I couldn’t. Though I was learning to fear them deeply in the small hours of the night. The next moment she pulled herself together like one gathering up a failed house of cards, and said, “Now tell me the gossip.” This became my purpose, the thing I could do for her, bring in news about life outside to surround her. She wasn’t prepared to leave what she had loved, although it belonged to others now, a moment before her time.
Belinda had wanted to give Nick and Grace a trip to Europe as a wedding present. They told her they couldn’t go because of their jobs, but the truth, I’m glad to say, was that they wouldn’t have anyway. This was no time, Grace said, to be leaving Belinda or Dinah, who was finally having her knee rebuilt. For a wedding trip, they took a long weekend and went to California.
“California!” said Belinda happily. “Oh, I love San Francisco! We used to go out and stay at The Clift. The light on the bay at twilight, all green and violet, is too beautiful to bear!” She would never see that light again, or see anything more than half an hour from the hospital. Grace and Nicky stayed at the Huntington, on the top of Nob Hill, at a cost that even Avis found hard to believe, and spent their time, as near as we could make out, at the zoo.
“Nicky loves zoos,” Grace reported, apparently finding this deeply charming. “He loves animals. When I wake up in the night and he’s not in bed, he’s always in the den, watching the Nature Channel.” He had wanted to take Sebastian on the honeymoon, but wisdom prevailed, and Sebastian was residing instead in Dinah’s kitchen.
After San Francisco, they drove down the coast to Monterey, where they spent half a day watching the sea horses at the aquarium. They spent a night at a paradise for sybarites set into the sere hills above Big Sur. They had a romantic dinner and a naked soak under the stars in the coed Japanese baths. “Ooh la la!” said Belinda. The next day they hiked in Los Padres National Forest, and afterward had side-by-side massages in their room.
They spent a night in Santa Barbara, and two nights in L.A.
“I never cared for Los Angeles,” said Belinda. “What did they find to do?”
“They spent one day at the Getty Museum and one at Disneyland.”
“Well, they are a pair,” Belinda said. And then, thoughtfully, ?
??But what kind of a newlywed twenty-eight-year-old is up in the middle of the night watching the Nature Channel?”
Nicky, as it turns out, loved L.A. He loved the climate, he loved the cars, he loved the beach at Malibu. We learned this when, about a month after the wedding trip, he was offered a part in a television pilot by one of his college pals, now a Hollywood hyphenate, writer-producer. I was keeping Dinah company as she pedaled resentfully on her recumbent bike machine, under orders from the P.T., whom she called her Physical Terrorist, when Nicky arrived with the news. (Grace had given Dinah an iPod already loaded with “Mom music” for her recuperation, but she hated exercise so much that mere music was not enough of a distraction or incentive. I came over a couple of times a week to crack the whip.)
“It’s a comedy/drama about a marriage license bureau,” said Nicky.
“Set in L.A.?”
“Keep pedaling, Mom. No, set in New York.”
Dinah grudgingly resumed her labors. “That’s good at least,” she said. “So you’ll film here?”
“Only the exteriors. If it goes, we’d be here a couple of days a month.”
Dinah stopped again.
“Keep pedaling, Mom.”
“Stuff it,” she said, hauling herself to her feet and making for her big chair by the fireplace. “Get me a Diet Coke, will you?”
Nicky came back with one for each of us.
“I’m playing the upper-class twit whose girlfriend leaves him at the altar, and he winds up working there. Alvin wrote the part for me.”
“Wait, Nick. I’m thrilled for you,” said Dinah. “But could I just point out that you have a wife and she lives in New York?”
“Gosh,” he said, slapping his forehead. “Is that who that girl is who’s always at my apartment when I get home? You must be right!”
“Not to mention your tragic old mother, whiling away her sunset years eating cat food by herself.”
“Grace loves Alvin’s work, and she knew I was an actor when she married me.”
“She did not. She thought you were going to be a lawyer. So did I. How are you going to pay your student loans if you quit?”
“She knew I was an actor first, and this job pays three times as much as I’d make as a starting lawyer.”
“Really?” said Dinah. “Three times?”
I said, “Alvin’s work?”
He named a couple of movies I had heard of but not followed closely, being fairly much opposed to entertainments with the word jackass in the title.
“What happens if the show doesn’t go?” I asked.
“I’ll finish school and be a lawyer.” Knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted that, but maybe he’d be a hit as an actor. Stranger things have happened.
“What’s the pilot about?” Dinah asked.
“There’s me and my girlfriend, Petula, a flower child who shows up with her new fiancé, some hedge fund monster, and she tells me she’ll always love me like a brother and asks me to give her away.”
“Give her away! How about throw her out a window?”
“I hope you don’t do it,” I said.
“I give her away. Weeping. Then for the rest of the show, just at the happiest moments, I wander through again, with tears streaming.”
“I guess that’s funny.”
“There’s the pink-haired punker who’s marrying a guy who needs a green card. They can’t understand a word of each other’s language. Then there’s a guy who wants a license to marry his cat, because she was his girlfriend in a former life.”
“That’s funny,” said Dinah.
“Then a guy who works in the bureau becomes hysterical and begins ranting about his lonely hovel and his Fiestaware, and trying to make his mother’s recipe for pot roast for one, and they take him away, and there I am, still weeping in the corner, so I get his job.”
Dinah and I look at each other. “For this we sent you to college?”
“I knew you’d be pleased,” said Nicky.
The pilot took four weeks to shoot. Grace, who’d begun student teaching, was exhausted, but she and Sebastian flew out for two of the weekends. Her friends all thought it was way cool.
Chapter 14
Dinah’s cooking classes started this way, that same spring of 2004. Dinah met a man at the rehab place where she went after she had her knee rebuilt. His name was Mike Allison. They passed each other several times in the hall before Dinah called to him, “I’m a knee, what are you?” He has one of those faces that looks sad or sullen in repose, but changes entirely when he smiles, which he did as he said, “I’m a hip.”
“Lucky you,” said Dinah as they stumped past each other on their walkers. Mike was a widower, a finance guy who had recently moved back to the city from the suburbs. He seemed lonely. “Two major crises: he lost his wife, then he lost his context,” Dinah told me.
“Then his hip.”
“Yes, but let the record show, knees are much worse than hips.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
The first time I saw Mike, he was walking ahead of me toward Dinah’s building with a bottle of wine and two bunches of tulips. I thought he well might be Dinah’s new friend and had a moment of disappointment at the silver hair, the round bald spot at the back of the head, the slight stoutness on what had the look of a once-athletic body. I hadn’t expected him to be old. When we were properly introduced and I saw him in the light, I realized he was younger than we are. This happens more and more, and it is quite disorienting. You’ll understand in about twenty years.
Dinah had invited me and Grace and two of Grace’s friends to a dinner that night to meet her new buddy, the hip. It was early May but still chilly weather. She had planned short ribs with horseradish sauce, a soup to start and panna cotta with caramel to finish, then she realized she couldn’t possibly stand long enough to cook it. I urged her to let me bring soup and buy dessert, but she said, “Grown men have been known to faint at my panna cotta.” Grace volunteered to be her sous chef so Dinah could sit and give orders.
By the time Mike and I arrived for that first dinner, the kitchen was an unholy mess but the apartment was filled with delicious smells. I set the table and showed Grace how to clean and arrange the tulips while Dinah and the hip man sat by the fire with their drinks and set about getting to know each other.
Everything about that evening clicked from the start. Grace’s young friends were freshly scrubbed and attractive and wildly appreciative of everything. Grace was in that heightened state that comes sometimes with the pleasure of mastering something you never thought you’d understand, and Mike—it had been years since I’d seen Dinah with a man who got her sense of humor so immediately and completely. I found myself wishing Gil could be there instead of wherever he was—in Aruba, I think it was—but I suppose that had its charms as well.
I was bringing in the salad—a simple green salad of butter lettuce with spiced walnuts and pomegranate seeds, if that’s your idea of simple—when I heard Grace say, “All right, come clean—what do you mean by your ‘misspent youth’?”
Mike’s face was pleasantly flushed, and he’d loosened his tie. “You promise not to laugh?”
We all promised.
He said, “I was an opera singer.”
“Shut up!” said Grace’s waiflike friend.
“Prove it,” said Dinah.
Mike straightened his posture and launched into “Una furtiva lagrima.” By the time he was done, I was in love if Dinah wasn’t. He told the rest of the story, how he started, why he stopped, while I was unmolding the panna cotta, so I missed much of it. But by the time the evening was over, the group was planning a rematch. Dinah had promised that she would teach all of them how to make chicken with forty garlic cloves the next week, and everyone was lobbying about what kind of dessert soufflés to make with it.
Thus began Dinah’s third career. Travel was no longer the pleasure it had been for her; climbing stairs or hills was a problem, and airline seats had come
to feel unreasonably confining. Lately she’d been accepting only assignments close enough to home to drive to or reach by train or subway, and how many times can you find new ways of describing another chrome-and-leather bachelor loft in the meatpacking district for yet another Goldman Sachs billionaire? Actually, if I’d been a writer, I’d probably have been able to carry it on for quite a while, since I really care about how things look. But Dinah has always wanted to know what they mean beneath the surface, and in her view, these private palaces didn’t mean anything underneath, except that the owners were much richer than she would ever be.
At first the classes were held every Saturday, and Grace’s friends began coming. Grace and Dinah were more and more in each other’s pockets, working smoothly together, sharing private jokes, almost as it had been with her and Simon Snyder. Dinah added weekday classes, and New York magazine wrote her up, followed soon after by a feature on her savory cocktail cookies in Oprah’s magazine. Her knee was healed and forgotten as she acquired new devotees, explored new cuisines, and sat for more interviews. During the second summer she moved out to Water Mill with Mike while her kitchen was remade for teaching large classes. She did a before-and-after article on the renovation, and with the fee was able to buy a huge Sub-Zero refrigerator and a restaurant-size freezer.
People pointed out that pouring money like that into an apartment you don’t own was a poor investment, but she said it was cheap insurance, protecting her from murder by landlord. And Mike was like the Man Who Came to Dinner and never went home. He helped with the prep work for the classes and paid for a helper to clean up after the meal was eaten and the students had gone. He and Dinah sang Sondheim together in the kitchen. The students ate the food they all prepared, course by course, perched on stools around the work island, made friends and started romances. Dinah hadn’t been so happy since before Richard met Charlotte.
And was Mike in love? I certainly thought so. If Dinah’s size was going to be a problem, that would have been apparent from the first, and it clearly wasn’t. There are more men than you think who prefer their ladies heavy, maybe because they feel it protects them from competition. If there are also erotic aspects to the phenomenon, and I suspect there are, I draw the veil. But I know at least one size eighteen wife of a real estate tycoon whose husband left her for a woman even larger, and it’s an interesting part of my business, finding really good clothes to fit them both.