Page 9 of Gossip


  Nicky was a theater major. He acted, he designed sets and lighting, he studied directing, and he wrote plays. Dinah was always in the audience when a show of his went up, whether he was onstage or had merely designed the posters. His college friends soon used the New York apartment as if they lived there, and Dinah presided with great contentment, as long as they didn’t smoke, bought their own beer, and didn’t talk to her in the morning until she’d had her coffee. One evening I walked into the apartment to find Nicky at the piano playing and singing the role of Sportin’ Life, as a group of his friends sight-read the score of Porgy and Bess. It was a happy time.

  During his junior year at college, both Nicky and Nala had internships in New York for their work-study term, and lived with Dinah. Nala worked in the office of a city councilman. Nicky was less serious; I believe his job that year was at a talent agency where they can’t have had much real use for him. Whatever he did there, it left him plenty of free time to drop in to gossip with me and Mrs. Oba. He liked helping me dress the windows and was very clever at it. He’d stage little dramas. He posed a mannequin in a moss-colored cut-velvet tea gown at a typewriter with a stack of reference books beside her and the entire floor of the window filled with crumpled balls of typing paper. When we saw how interested people were, the mannequin began to write a story. Every few days, Nicky would add a paragraph to the page in the typewriter: “Michel, you promised!” cried Evangeline, heartbroken. “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Michel replied, lighting a Gauloises.

  When he couldn’t think what would happen next, he’d crumple the paper, throw it on the floor, and begin a new page. I sold three copies of that tea gown, and it wasn’t cheap, and so many people were stopping by every day or two to see how the mannequin’s novel was going that we even got a mention in Liz Smith.

  I remember one evening that winter at Dinah’s. Nala had made a fiery stew with chilies and peanuts that had left us gasping. Dinah rushed to the kitchen for beer for all of us. When she could talk, she said, “Beer is full of sugar, it quiets the heat. Julia Child taught me that.” And Nicky dropped his fork on the floor.

  Recovering my own voice, I said, “Dinah, you’re amazing. How on earth do you know Julia Child?”

  “Her nephew Jon is a friend of mine. Haven’t you ever met him here? Auntie Julia has made mayonnaise in this very kitchen,” she said.

  Actually, I’d have loved to meet Julia Child, and I think Dinah knew it. Oh well.

  The conversation jogged on until Dinah happened to mention something she’d said to Jane recently.

  “Jane?” Nala asked politely.

  “Oh, sorry,” said Dinah. “An American actress. Jane Fonda.” Nala and Nicholas dropped their dessert spoons. Nala began to laugh, a delicious rippling giggle.

  “All right, what?” said Dinah. She loved being teased by Nicky.

  “My brother,” said Nala in her charming accent. “At Cambridge, he sang in the choir at his college. If anyone name-dropped during the service, the choristers dropped their pencils. One day a visiting priest said in his homily, ‘I was having tea with the queen . . .’ and the whole choir dropped their hymnbooks.”

  She was a joy, Nala. We all took it hard when she moved back to Amsterdam, and we still drop cutlery when Dinah drops names. And it was years before Nicky took up with another girl.

  Meanwhile, Richard Wainwright, born with a silver spoon, was no longer having an easy time of it. Remember all through 1999, the hysteria about the Y2K bug that was going to run riot in cyberspace when the calendar rolled to 2000? Richard had a truly ancient Volkswagen beetle that he restored himself and still drove around the village only partly for reason of style. In 1999 he got it a license plate that said Y1K, which even Dinah conceded was witty.

  “Year One K Bug.” You understand the problem. Nicky said that people in Ardsley kept asking Richard why his license plate said Yick, so he gave it up. What an innocent time that seems now, when a big computer crash was the worst national disaster we could think of.

  Anyway, in the fall of 2000 Richard came into the shop. I remember that I’d been up in my flat with the deliveryman, stacking the first bundles of the season’s firewood. I came back down to find a tall, slightly stooped man in a knockoff Burberry barn jacket idly studying the costume jewelry in the case that acts as a sales desk. I didn’t know him until he turned to face me, smiling.

  “Richard!” We embraced. “What brings you here?”

  “Are you busy?”

  “As you see.” We were not.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I have a client coming at two-thirty, but I’m free as air until then. Come upstairs.”

  We exchanged small talk while I heated a kettle for tea. When we were both seated with our cups in my little sitting room, he said, “Do you think Dinah would see me? Sit down to talk?”

  We all saw one another at graduations and weddings and such events, and had even had dinner together at Dinah’s the year before when RJ and his wife were in town for a theater weekend, so he meant something different.

  “Has something happened? Your health? Charlotte or the girls?”

  “Everyone’s fine.”

  I waited.

  “Dinah’s doing pretty well, isn’t she?” he asked.

  “Her knee is hurting her.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “Well. We both know she’s too heavy.”

  “Yes. I meant . . . financially?”

  I didn’t answer, so he went on.

  “Someone told me lately what that magazine she writes for pays. I had no idea. I mean, I was impressed.”

  “She’s very good at what she does. Of course they don’t all pay as well as that.”

  “No.”

  “And freelance is freelance. You never know when your last job may be.”

  Naturally I knew where this was going.

  “Colette and Mary are both in college, as of September.”

  “Where is Mary going?”

  “Wheaton.”

  Having not had the pleasure myself, that exhausted my supply of conversation on the topic.

  “I have to admit, I’m stretched pretty thin,” he said.

  I said I could imagine.

  “Would you mind . . . would you ask Dinah if she’d have lunch with me? She’d take it better if it came from you.”

  I considered. “You may overestimate my influence, but I’ll try. Do you want me to tell her what it’s about?”

  “I imagine she’ll guess, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  I asked her. She said, “I can guess what this is about.”

  I agreed.

  “Do you think I should?” she asked. She clearly didn’t want to.

  “He says his margins are pretty skimpy, and I believe it. Scary, at our age.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “No. But how do the boys see it, do you think?”

  She’d come over to have lunch with me in the apartment. I’d bought sushi, and she’d brought a beetroot salad and a tin of homemade lemon squares.

  “Do you mean they think I’m mean?”

  “I have no idea. But they don’t mind Charlotte and they love their sisters, and I’m sure they notice.”

  “Notice what?”

  “If Richard’s family is eating chili dogs and cutting their own hair, and you’re eating foie gras and renting a house on Martha’s Vineyard.”

  “Richard is cutting his own hair?”

  “Looks like it to me.”

  We both knew that she could afford to take reduced alimony, and the wound to her amour propre of Richard’s leaving was decades old; she’d endured others far more recent.

  I don’t know what went wrong at their lunch, but something did. Richard came to the shop afterward, looking glum. Apparently sentences like “You should have thought of that before you started fucking that popsie” had been uttered. I don’t know.

  “She got furious because Charlo
tte doesn’t work. But she does work, she’s got her real estate license and she does the best she can. There’s a lot of competition in the suburbs,” he said unhappily.

  “What did Dinah say to that?”

  “Tough.”

  Well, I knew that Dinah. The Dinah who’d grown up on the wrong side of the walls of Canaan Woods, whose mother still bought most of her clothes at what she called Salvation Armani, Dinah whose mother had sold real estate and done it very well, in an era when nobody’s mother worked. That she had chosen to marry Richard in spite of and because of what he represented to her had always struck me as touching. But it was far too late to ask Richard to see it that way. Once he told me that she’d started in about his trust fund, I knew he was cooked. He looked sunk.

  “How serious is it?” I asked him. The financial situation.

  “Well, of course, I can take on more debt.”

  “Could your parents . . . ?”

  He shook his head. “They lived through the Depression. My father gets that pained expression and starts to chew his mustache when he even thinks about debt; he doesn’t even approve of mortgages. And they’re spending more than they really should themselves these days. My mom needs full-time care, you know.”

  “I didn’t. I’m sorry. Is she still at home?” Richard’s mother had to be deep in her nineties.

  “Yes, nursing home for one. You can imagine what that costs.”

  I could. And of course, it was their money.

  “Well,” he said, “time to make some changes.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I guess I’ll see if I can go back to Wall Street. I’ve had a call or two from headhunters in the past.”

  “Oh, Richard.” I knew how much he’d come to hate the commute, and how happy he’d been when he had started his own business in Westchester. He ran a family office for eight or ten high rollers he knew, looking after the investments, insurance, estate planning, and such that they didn’t have time to attend to themselves. It wasn’t sexy, but it required skill, judgment, and absolute integrity, qualities that are not all that easy to find in this wicked world.

  “I used to know a lot about securitization. That commands a premium on the Street these days. It won’t kill me.”

  Famous last words. As a minor act of subversion, I sent him home with Dinah’s tin of lemon squares.

  Dinah half-regretted refusing to give him a break. I knew this because she kept justifying herself afterward.

  “What if I want to retire? I’d like to get a dog. If I didn’t have to travel all the time, I could get a dog.”

  “You want a dog?”

  “I’d love a dog.”

  It was the first I’d heard of it. “What kind?”

  “A nice clean grateful mutt. I like mutts. I believe in hybrid vigor.”

  Richard and Charlotte had a Portuguese water dog that had cost a fortune.

  Things jogged on. Richard closed his business and took a job way downtown, analyzing something or other, at a decent salary, though what he seemed most grateful for was the gold-plated health insurance.

  A wise man told me once that growing up means the death of many talents. Nicky’s first job out of college was in a touring company of Les Misérables. We thought he was on his way, the next Matthew Broderick, but he quit after three months. He said he was bored with the road, and we suspected some affair gone wrong with someone in the company, but he never explained. He moved back home and started a novel for real. Dinah bought him a fancy computer, but after six months he admitted he wasn’t making a great deal more progress than the author of the immortal tale of Michel and Evangeline, and he was really tired of having no spending money. Richard said he was sorry he couldn’t help him. He had three daughters to put through school, and Nicky was just going to have to figure it out. His brother, RJ, had now finished business school and taken a job with Alcoa in Pittsburgh. Nicky gave up and took the LSAT, preparing to apply to law school.

  While he waited, Dinah got Nicky a job in a literary agency. It was a small office. He read submissions, answered the phones, and gossiped with the bookkeeper, who came in twice a week. At night he sang with a Brooklyn band called Monkeys Have the Bomb. Dinah asked if we could come see them perform, but he said, “Oh no. You’d experience it as punishment.” He got overtired working days as well as nights, he got mononucleosis, he lost both jobs and spent two months recovering in his boyhood bedroom. Even Dinah was beginning to see a downside to having such a big apartment. She began to say that Nicky’s career plan was to outlive her, inherit the lease, then rent out rooms.

  Finally he got another job with the articles editor at a fashion magazine. He loved it, and they loved him. I don’t think Richard was awfully pleased. Where he came from, for a man to work in fashion was sort of like joining the circus, bizarre but not in an interesting way. We pointed out that Nicky wasn’t really working in fashion, he was in the Magazine World.

  “It isn’t exactly Newsweek, is it?” was Richard’s response.

  “God, Richard, when did you get so stuffy?” Dinah asked him.

  “Well at least he has health insurance,” Richard said.

  “Health insurance, and he’s surrounded by chic, beautiful people, and it’s fun!”

  “Fun,” said Richard. “Is that what work is supposed to be?”

  Dinah went to the Vineyard for two months that summer. The cottage she rented was covered in climbing roses. RJ and his family spent a week in July with her, and Nicky went for a week in August and filled the house with friends. I went up for Labor Day weekend to see what all the fuss was about, and I must say, it was heaven. The rooms were small but bright and fragrant from the roses, and from the deck at the back of the house you could hear the ocean. The kitchen was arrayed with fresh mint, basil, parsley, and dill from the farmers’ market in water glasses as if they were bunches of flowers. In the evening there was always a kettle of mussels on the stove, or a bouillabaisse or paella.

  I’d been home for a week—I was still suntanned—the morning the world blew up.

  Uptown we didn’t feel the first plane ram the North Tower, or see the dogs in the park come off the ground or the birds knocked out of the trees as they did in Washington Square. What happened to us was the phones started ringing. Gil called me first, to tell me to turn on the television. RJ in Pittsburgh, dressing for work while his wife got the kids’ breakfast, called Dinah.

  “Good morning, my treasure,” she had said happily, because no one but one of her sons would call her at that hour. He told her to turn on the television. All networks were showing a live shot of the World Trade Center, where there was a plane-shaped hole in the north face of one building as the smoke poured into the sky and people hung out the windows in the floors above the gash, looking skyward and waving.

  “Dad’s down there,” said RJ in a panicked voice, like someone shouting orders.

  For a moment Dinah went blank. Could that be true?

  “No, he’s—”

  “Yes, Mom, he is. His office is in the World Trade Center. I’m looking at my address book.”

  “What floor?”

  “Ninety-fourth.”

  “Jesus. And what the hell happened? Some asshole in a Cessna, trying to . . .”

  “That’s Dad’s building.”

  They were watching, trying to count up the floors to see which ones were burning, when the second plane hit.

  So was I; I couldn’t stop looking. On the screen, the top slumped sideways off the South Tower, and then the whole building was gone. What can that have sounded like? I don’t remember hearing anything from the television, just the image. So many souls streaming into heaven at once . . .

  I tried to call Gil back—I realized I was hysterical—but either his line was busy or the lines were down. I was standing in my stocking feet staring at the television when my phone rang the second time. Dinah. She told me about Richard.

  For a moment—this is the measure of my shock—I wasn??
?t sure who she meant. RJ? Was RJ in New York for business for some reason? Or did she mean Richard Flanagan, the wine expert she’d dated until she figured out he was a pathological liar?

  “RJ says his office is in the North Tower. Ninety-fourth floor. He’s not answering his cell phone. Charlotte says he left at the usual time, and he’s always in the office by eight-thirty.”

  “Where’s Nicky?”

  “On his way down there.”

  “I’ll come. Hang up and keep your line free.”

  Of course we didn’t open the shop that day. Mrs. Oba was stuck underground on a train from Brooklyn. When the train finally inched into the East Broadway station, the passengers were released, but by then the subway system was shut down. Everyone feared another attack, maybe on the transit system. In fact, we went on fearing that for months. Years.

  Nicky never got below Canal Street, and downtown below Franklin was evacuated, the gas and electric to the buildings cut off. No one knew where the next explosion might be, and they needed all the power they could get at the crime site. Mrs. Oba, I learned later that night, had walked back over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn and all the way home. It took her seven hours.

  Nicky reached Dinah’s apartment at about noon. He had been standing at Canal and Hudson before the North Tower fell, and he’d seen with naked eyes what looked to him at first like silver coating peeling from the surface of the flaming building until the guy standing next to him said, “Dude—those are people jumping.”

  He wasn’t in such great shape when he got to us. He said he could see right through the building where the plane had hit. Those two floors, or more, were gone, the space empty except for flames and supporting columns at the corners of the building. On the floors above the breach, people were still waving at helicopters, still apparently thinking they could be rescued. Thinking someday they’d describe this day to their grandchildren.

  He’d tried to get past the cordons, without luck. There were hundreds like him, trying to go toward the site, crying, “My daughter, my husband, my girlfriend . . .” but the police were deaf to it. All the traffic was streaming the other way, thousands of workers and residents walking north in whatever they happened to be wearing when the first tower fell. Some were ghostlike, covered in a sticky chalk layer of gray dust. It didn’t do to think about what was in that dust.