Nicky’s pilot didn’t sweep the ratings, but it did well enough for the network to order six shows. When those did well enough, the bosses ordered six more, a full season. Avis was sweetly proud of him. She told all her friends about the show and stopped going out on Tuesday evenings so she could watch it. Grace rolled her eyes and said, “You could TiVo it, Mother,” but Avis said, “That wouldn’t be any fun,” meaning she didn’t know how. “Besides, doesn’t it help the ratings if I watch it when it’s broadcast?”
“No,” said Grace.
At a dinner Grace and I attended, Avis told her guests about Nicky’s show. “You should watch, you really should, they are perfectly charming. They’re directed by that young man Albert Grable, who makes those movies.”
“Writer-producer, Mother,” said Grace. “And it’s Alvin.”
Avis paused. “What did I say?”
“You said director.”
“Oh,” said Avis, and looked a little sad.
Grace had only joined us that evening because she was restless and lonely. Nicky hadn’t been home for three weeks.
One afternoon in late fall of that year, on a last day of Indian summer, I closed the shop early and walked, wearing only a light wool jacket, all the way to Belinda’s apartment, relishing the sun on my face, and the last gold leaves still clinging to naked branches. Althea Flood had gone to Venice with friends, and Gil and I were to have a whole week together, the first good stretch in what seemed like eons. I couldn’t wait to get up to Connecticut, to be sure my gardens were properly covered in pine boughs and ready for winter.
Ursula opened the door to me and exclaimed, “Missus Lovie!”
“How are you, dear, on this beautiful day?” I handed her my jacket.
“Fine, missus! . . . Missus Avis is here, missus!”
“How nice. Upstairs?”
“In the study, missus.”
I went in to find mother and daughter just beginning a Great Inca tea, with cookies and hot cinnamon toast and the whole silver tea service on a table before Avis. The teapot had an incongruous tea cozy over it, printed with blueberries. I kissed both my friends and took a seat on the sofa with Avis, who poured.
“We were just talking about Iraq,” said Belinda. She was sitting in a chair carefully fitted with just the right pillows, in reach of the radio. The metal tree from which her bags hung was behind her, and Harold and Maude in their day bag were tucked into the chair beside her. I didn’t like the color of the fluid in the tubes snaking out from under Belinda’s bed jacket, but she herself looked lovely, with her hair done and her makeup in place. I noticed she barely ate anything, except to nibble from time to time on a piece of naked ginger from the bowl on the tea tray. Avis had it sent up from the club because it settled her stomach.
“You look lovely,” I said to Belinda as I accepted my cup.
“Don’t I? Ursula is just a whiz. She insisted on going with me the last time I had my hair done, and she studied everything, the shampoo, the blowout, and now she can do it all. She blows me out every morning.”
“You’re not letting her cut it, are you?” Avis asked, sounding alarmed.
“No, Lance comes up if I can’t go to him. But I have no doubt she could do it if she had to. I don’t know how I got so lucky.” She beamed. Avis and I managed not to look at each other. I wished I could have Belinda’s temperament transplanted into me like a cornea or a kidney when she no longer needed it . . . but no. Spiritual attainments come to you only one way.
Then just as everything seemed perfect in our world, except that one of us was dying a painful and relentless death, Grace blew in.
She was excited, and her cheek still smelled of the fresh fall air as she kissed us in turn.
“What brings you here, darling?” asked Belinda. “Have some tea, it’s still hot.”
“First I need the loo.” She took her handbag and dashed off. Ursula rushed in and took away our teapot to refill it with smoky lapsang souchong, Miss Grace’s special favorite.
When Grace came back, very excited, she was carrying something not unlike a Popsicle stick. She showed it to me and demanded, “Lovie, isn’t that pink? Right there, that line?”
Although I would have loved to be the final arbiter, I had to say, “But really, I’m not the one to ask . . .”
Belinda said “What have you got there?”
Grace rushed back to the bathroom to throw the stick away and wash her hands, and when she came back, she sat down and drummed her feet on the floor in an ecstatic tattoo. “Granny, I’m pregnant!”
Avis clapped her hands and cried, “Oh Grace!”
Belinda said in amazement, “You are? Have you been to the doctor?”
“No, but this morning I suddenly realized how late I was, and I’m never late, never, so I got a home test on the way to school, but then I couldn’t do it at school, in the bathroom with the little girls going in and out . . . I’ve been going crazy all day, waiting to get out, and it was faster to come here than to go home, so . . . I’m pregnant!”
Belinda radiated joy and held out her arms. Grace flew into them. Then Grace kissed her mother again, and me, and then she did another jig of joy on the carpet.
The end came for Belinda less than a week later. It seemed shockingly sudden, because it began as had so many other crises that she had survived. Just the day before, I had ridden downtown with her on a mission to Grace’s apartment, to see the plans for turning the den into a nursery. That was a lovely afternoon. She wheeled around the apartment in her chair, admiring everything. She got tired a little before I realized she was done, but she dozed in the car on the way back, and we got her upstairs and into bed for a good nap before supper. Avis saw her in the evening and said she was crowing about her outing.
The next morning, though, something went wrong with Harold and Maude, and she was back in MSK to have them replumbed. Ursula was with her, clutching the bag with Belinda’s hospital shawl, her books, and the cell phone Avis had insisted she carry so her friends could find her without having to know where she was. Avis was there all morning as well, since a hospital is no place to leave a loved one alone. When she was still in lockdown by the afternoon, Avis called me to take over; she wanted to explain in person to Gordon Hall why she couldn’t fly to Ireland that night to look at a picture that might or might not be a Ribera.
They let me take her home at about five that evening. I’d sent Ursula ahead to get ready. Belinda seemed fine, if weary. Once she was in bed, and finally shaking off the last of the sedative, she wasn’t quite ready for me to go.
“They want me to think about hospice care,” she said. “But it’s too soon.”
I said enthusiastically that of course it was. I was still working on whether she could manage a trip to see the skaters at Rockefeller Center, if we wrapped her up carefully and the driver lifted her into and out of the car. Belinda looked at me quizzically and said, “You do know this story only ends one way, don’t you?”
She was back in the slammer the next day; the drains were leaking again. They let her go home once more; Friday she was back yet again. This time they kept her overnight, and on Saturday morning, Avis called me in tears of anger. A young doctor had looked at Belinda’s chart and said to her brutally, “Why are you here? There is nothing more we can do for you.”
Soon one of the doctors who had cared for Belinda with such humanity appeared. She apologized. She grieved with Avis. She said they were willing to keep trying the temporary fixes that had bought Belinda days, then hours. But they couldn’t rescind the message. It was always going to end only one way.
Belinda said, “I want to go home, but I don’t want to die in my own bed. I don’t want to make that kind of mess for Ursula.”
We ordered a hospital bed and called hospice. Avis sent word to an e-mail list of friends that Belinda would love to see cards or flowers but please, not to visit, as the family wanted her last energy, her last consciousness for themselves. I stayed away until Avis
called to say the message didn’t apply to me. Nicky took the red-eye home. Grace’s stepsisters left their families and came. Two or three of us were always with Belinda from that time forward. Ursula continued to do her hair, which annoyed the nurses and pleased Belinda. She had said to all of us, “Don’t let me die without lipstick.” That became the final act of fealty Ursula could show to the Great Inca. The nurses wiped Belinda’s face and took the lipstick off. Ursula, ever vigilant, darted in and reapplied it. I still can’t speak of it without wanting to cry.
Very early on the fourth morning, Belinda opened her eyes, looked straight at Avis, said “Thank you,” and died. And not a day goes by that I don’t want to call her, to tell her something only she would understand, to ask her something only she would know.
At the funeral, I sat in front with Dinah. When almost all the pews were full, the family appeared from wherever they’d been huddled. Avis and Grace walked up the aisle together, their arms around each other, between two banks in the sea of mourners. Nicky came behind them, escorting a desolate Ursula, and then came Hilary and Catherine with their husbands and children. Gil was across the aisle, about halfway back, alone. Althea was still in Venice.
Our grief was deep and pure, and I thought at the time, unutterably painful. Now I know the difference between a grieving heart and a heart both grieving and outraged. If you want to talk about pain.
Dinah was just the slightest bit satirical about Grace asking me, the childless spinster, to help her interpret her pregnancy test. She said she understood perfectly why she was not the first to know that Grace was pregnant, as she’d assumed she would be. Belinda’s apartment was right across the park from Grace’s school. And Belinda, after all, had been dying at the time.
Still.
And life went on. As it will.
The winter and spring of 2005 passed quietly for Gil and me. We spent long weekends in Connecticut, where my lilacs, when they finally came, were spectacular, followed by irises as lovely as any I’ve seen. But I know now that things were not so happy for Grace. Now that she had her degree and a full-time teaching job, she had her evenings and weekends back and no one to share them with, and she missed Belinda. She’d gone out to California a number of times during the summer and fall, but if Nicky was working, it was a bore to be on the set—the cast was a team, and she wasn’t part of it, no matter how often Nicky told us how much his friends loved her. If she didn’t go to the set, she had nothing to do. Nicky’s apartment was tiny, and he was a surprisingly careful housekeeper. There was no particular use in her shopping for dish towels or rearranging the kitchen drawers. She rambled alone around Santa Monica, or went window-shopping on Rodeo Drive, or cooked him elaborate meals he didn’t want when he got home, since the craft services food suited him fine. When she was there, she missed her friends and her New York world. And one weekend in January she’d flown out to surprise him and found that he wasn’t working at all; he could have come home but just didn’t feel like it. It was slushy and cold in New York, and Malibu was eighty degrees and sunny. (Avis told me this only very recently. I guess Grace felt she couldn’t complain to either me or Dinah. She had told her mother.)
The winter weather had finally given way to spring the afternoon I sat down with a cup of chai and a newspaper, turned to the gossip page, and stopped. The headline for the lead story was “Divorce at the Marriage Bureau?” It was accompanied by a picture of Alvin Grable and Nicky on the set of the show, laughing. The copy read, “Sources tell us that Nick Wainwright, a star of Alvin Grable’s struggling sitcom, The Marriage Bureau, punched his boss at an after-hours club called The Situation Room, on Melrose, after an altercation. Apparently Wainwright took issue with a remark Grable made to a cocktail waitress and was defending the damsel, but police aren’t buying it. Wainwright and Grable, friends since college days, refused to comment.”
Dinah was blasé about it. “No such thing as bad publicity,” she said. She and Mike were getting ready to leave for London for a week of theater. Grace was more upset.
“It seems so unlike him,” she said when I called her.
“What does Nicky say?”
“He says that Alvin was drunk and being a jerk and the papers blew it all out of proportion.”
There were follow-up stories the next day. “Insiders” were saying that tensions had been building on the set for some time. One source claimed the two had had words over an episode for which Nicky felt he deserved a writing credit. Reps for Grable and Wainwright said the story was ridiculous, and police confirmed that Oscar-nominated Grable was not pressing charges. That night Grable went on Letterman with his head swathed in bandages and swore he was unhurt, there had been no assault, he had bumped into a door in the dark during a midnight visit to an elderly aunt.
The Marriage Bureau’s ratings were up two weeks in a row, and the network ordered six new episodes. The celebrating had barely subsided when Nicky was written out of the show.
The children’s apartment, which I suspected Avis paid for, was in a new building on the edge of the East Village. It had two bedrooms and two full baths, but the apartments were designed like dorm suites, with the bedrooms on opposite sides of the common space, the better to share with someone you didn’t really want to be that close to.
By Easter the second bedroom had been fully converted from a den to a nursery. Since Grace had elected not to be told the sex of the baby, Avis had bought a crib with flannel bumpers decorated with gender-neutral bunnies; Grace had filled the dresser with bibs and onesies, flannel sheets and blankets, tiny socks and hats. A padded changing table was equipped with wipes and Q-tips, disposable diapers, and a smell-proof pail. “Although,” said Avis, surprising us both, “as long as you nurse, the caca smells very sweet.” Grace looked surprised that her mother had any opinion on baby shit, let alone actually liked it.
Grace was sitting in this room alone at about ten o’clock one June night, reading a parenting magazine and rocking in the nursing chair Avis had sent her, when she heard the apartment door open.
Her heart lurched. No one had buzzed from downstairs to be let in. Lately some of their neighbors had buzzed in strangers, two of whom had been found smoking pot on the roof, and there had been fussing about deliverymen who dropped off their kung pao chicken, then illegally roamed through the halls shoving menus under doors. One, when confronted, had menaced a teenage boy on the fourth floor. There had been a tenants’ meeting.
She sat still, listening. She hadn’t heard the door close. She called, “Hello?”
Oh shit, oh shit . . . wrong thing to do. Footsteps started toward her. She pictured a psycho delivery guy pacing the halls, trying doors. She’d left the front door unlocked. Had she? She must have. Where was her phone? On the counter in the kitchen. She was a mother. Almost a mother. She was clumsy and enormous; no one would attack a woman this pregnant. If she were killed, the baby could live outside her. Would the attacker cut the baby out, like the Manson Family killers? She looked around for something to protect herself with. Shit!
She wrapped her arms around her huge belly as the footsteps approached the door. She’d defend this baby with nails and teeth if she had to. She wished she could kickbox. She wished she were wearing high heels instead of fuzzy slippers. They call those heels stilettos for a reason. She sat in the yellow light of the baby’s circus lamp, with painted clowns dancing around the rim, and stared at the open door, waiting for her fate.
Nicky appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a beer hat, a transparent inflated plastic mug of beer with foam on top. Grace screamed, and the baby seemed to somersault.
“Nicky! You monster! Why didn’t you call?”
She was in his arms, halfway between laughing and crying.
“Hey,” he said, “it kicked me!”
The baby, under her rapidly pounding heart, was doing gymnastics. Was it frightened too? Was this bad for it? Nicky laid his head against her stomach. She removed his beer hat and buried both hands in his thick
dark hair. The useless Sebastian, sound asleep up to now, was at last prancing around Nicky’s feet, barking excitement.
“I could have died of fright! Why didn’t you call?”
“I thought it would be fun to catch you in flagrante with your lover.”
She swatted him, then followed him to the front door, asking questions. The door was propped open with a suitcase, and two more were in the hall.
“I got done faster than I expected. Found a tenant for the apartment, sold the guy my furniture, packed, went to the airport, and got a seat on standby. They even upgraded me to middle class because I’m a famous actor!”
Later she found his ticket on the dresser and noticed he had actually bought a full-price ticket in business class. Well, she thought, he’d had a nasty couple of weeks, and he deserved a little comfort. And he could afford it.
Grace went into labor two weeks later. Avis was already at the hospital when Dinah arrived with a bag full of magazines, lollipops for the mother, and food. A nurse alerted Nicky that the grandmothers were in waiting, and he came out to take the lollipops.
Dinah said, “In my day, they only let you have ice chips after the enema,” rather hoping, if I know Dinah, that talk of enemas would discomfit Avis.
“How well I remember,” said Avis.
“You do?” Dinah assumed that Avis would have had herself rendered insensible, or somehow delegated the labor to staff.
“Yes, and Grace took twenty-three hours to present herself. I was absolutely starving.”
“My first one was six hours, but Nicky was practically born in the taxi.”