"It just has so much s.p.a.ce, so much potential," Melissa said. "It"s like a ripe tomato waiting to be cut. Oh G.o.d, I can hardly stand knowing that house is out there."
When Truman Capote was alive he had designed his Long Island home himself. He told Architectural Digest that his design principle was "unfinished" and designers were a "bore."
Melinda sipped her drink. "Though, I suppose it"s all right. Right now, I"m doing Woody Allen"s apartment. This is his third redo in ten years. It"s the most exotic challenge. He says he wants this apartment to reflect his current self-image."
I figured that was a lie as well but was proved wrong when a few months later, Melinda got sick with meningitis and called me to take over the job, with the promise that I give her 15 percent of my earnings. I became even more convinced when I stood on the terrace of Woody Allen"s New York City penthouse, surrounded by a garden of lilies next to a small pond. I asked him whether he wanted his apartment to feel lived in, and he said, "Yes, of course!"
"By whom?" I asked.
"By me!" he said.
"A good place to start," I said.
"Or, well, by Kierkegaard," he added.
"All right."
"Or maybe Kokoschka."
I wrote them all down in my notebook.
"I don"t know," he said, sitting down. "I like that question. I"ll have to think about it."
"Jack is late," Orrin said, looking at his watch. "I guess everyone in this town is just late, late, late."
"That"s because the f.u.c.king houses in Greenwich are too far apart!" Adora cried. "That"s why I never trick-or-treated here when I was a kid."
Barbara Walters"s third cousin was by the water fountain explaining the difference between Sunni and Shiite over the mashing of shrimp in our mouths, the African parrot was down the hall shouting, "h.e.l.lo, banana!" There was the faint cry of the maid in the kitchen yelling on the phone, and the chitter-chatterings about the advantages of winter weddings-silky hair, red cheeks, frosted windows.
"You might even consider sewing seal fur into the bodice of your dress," one of Adora"s friends told her.
We were on a red couch that cost the same as a second mortgage for a house (not as big as this), but in a house (as big as this) there was too much s.p.a.ce for everything. The distance between Mondrian paintings was too vast. The house was like a museum in transition. The lamps were chrome, but the wood was dark mahogany; the pool was half-indoors, half-outdoors. The mirrors were kept too high up on the walls so n.o.body could see their own reflection, though Orrin was so handsome and Adora was so beautiful with blond curls down her back, this seemed like a nice thing to do for the guests since the last thing anybody wanted to be in this house was their actual self.
The more Orrin"s friends talked, the less I understood: Williams is the new Harvard and has always been the new Harvard; being Indian is very fashionable right now.
"Has my mother arrived?" I asked Adora.
"My father just called," Adora said. "They will be late as well. He said to start without them."
"Start what exactly?" Orrin asked.
"The general partying, I suppose," I said.
"But the partying has started," Orrin said. We looked around at the room, the guests barely moving, barely talking, the room looking more like a painting of a party.
"Begin!" I shouted so loud, a woman in purple cheetah print spilled her drink. "Everybody, please begin amicably socializing!"
To be honest, by that point, I was a little drunk.
The room laughed.
"I love you," Adora said, putting her arm around me. This meant she was drunk too.
What we could not see: in the kitchen, the maid put down the plastic ladle on the hot stove and called her boyfriend. She walked into the pantry. She cried on the granite tiles and stared at the endless variations of jarred Italian imports, roasted red peppers and a rare olive oil, while she tried to tell her boyfriend she didn"t want to be with him anymore.
I was in the dining room and my mouth was hot and burning with horseradish when the front door opened. I could feel the pool on my skin, like a hotel pool warm and sweaty like a baby, the humidity emanating to all the rooms, clinging to the sweat on my skin. I told my clients never to build pools inside their homes, water seeks water, and you, I would say, are 70 percent water.
A brown-haired man stood tall in the frame, snow drifted inward, and he hung his black trench coat on the rack. He brushed the snow off his Florsheim shoes.
"Jack"s here!" Adora screamed. She interlaced her arm with his and walked toward us.
"This is Jack," Adora said to me, like she was introducing me to the president of the United States.
He stuck out his hand. I put my hair behind my ear.
"Emily," Adora said to me, "our friend is introducing himself to you."
"h.e.l.lo," I finally said.
Mr. Basketball or Jonathan or Jack shook my hand, our matching eyes still wild with surprise.
"Well, what was that?" Adora said, looking at the two of us, standing in the doorway.
Jonathan watched me from the bar, as if to say, so this is Emily: Emily is by the bar. Emily obviously doesn"t know anybody here. Not even the cousins, and you should always always know the cousins!
And I watched him. Jonathan"s hair was shorter now, and his skin was wrinkled at the forehead. He was thirty-five, and different again, except for his eyes. "Eyes can never wrinkle and are eternal in this way," my eye doctor once told me too close to my face.
Jonathan filled my gla.s.s two times in an hour and when he opened the vodka bottle to pour a third, it occurred to me that he had always liked to pour my drinks. It occurred to me his wife was not there.
"Who is this guy?" Kevin whispered in my ear.
"An old friend," I said, shrugging Kevin"s breath off me.
The third time Jonathan tried to pour me a drink, Kevin covered my gla.s.s with his hands. He took the vodka out of Jonathan"s, and I took it out of Kevin"s. "I"ll just pour myself a gla.s.s."
At dinner, everything was formal. We were given a.s.signed seats and I was between Kevin and a man named Harry. Adora thought Harry and I could make a great couple someday, if we only set aside our major differences, and Kevin. Adora was sitting down, her name written out in purple cursive at the head of the table, where she was proud and long-haired like a purebred, nibbling on coleslaw vinaigrette, with fresh lime juice, Harry told me as he squeezed some onto my plate. Harry was staring at me. Adora was running her hand on Orrin"s leg underneath the table. Orrin was not even smiling. Jonathan was asking me if I would like to pa.s.s him the bread basket as though it were an option to deny someone the bread basket.
"Hey hey, a toast to Orrin and Adora!" Harry said. "May their marriage be a long and loving one!"
I was jealous that Adora was the kind of woman who could spread b.u.t.ter smoothly and mine ripped the bread. I was angry that Jonathan had come back as Jack without telling me, that he had started to part his hair down the middle of his head, and shaved his beard so close to the skin his chin shined like some dope on a magazine we would have made fun of once. Jonathan started telling a story about his old law professor and everybody laughed, and I was certain it had become impossible to breathe at the table, so I went to the bathroom.
When I returned, Harry informed me that he was an arborist by trade.
"My campaign lately has been shallow roots," he said.
Jonathan looked at me, as though he was waiting for me to laugh with him. He was nodding his winegla.s.s toward me like we were in on some great joke together, like we were always in on some great joke together, and when he did this, he looked like Mr. Basketball again, reaching over my lap to open the car door. When he stopped smiling and sat back in his chair to look at me, he was Jonathan again, calm and at a distance in front of the statue in Prague, reaching out his hand to wipe the damp hair off his forehead. And when he leaned forward and stabbed the meat on his plate with his fork, he was Jack and I felt I hardly knew him.
Kevin squeezed my hand. Underneath the table, everybody"s feet were still wet from the snow.
In the kitchen, the plastic ladle was starting to melt on the stove.
The kitchen was so far away from the dining room, there was no way for us to know this. The fire alarm was installed only in the upstairs, and when Orrin found this out after part of the house burned down, he blamed the whole thing on his f.u.c.king father, who, according to him, was so f.u.c.king stupid he exclusively hired stupid f.u.c.king people who never took care of anything in his f.u.c.king stupid house.
The maid was on the floor in the pantry with the phone in her hand, and the doors were so thick with mahogany, even the maid didn"t know a fire was starting. The maid was a twenty-five-year-old girl from Austria and she was lying down as though she were playing dead but she was alive, with a broken heart; she was a heaving chest of grief, she would tell the police later in broken English.
"You were in the closet when the fire began and you were a heaving chest of what?" the police would ask.
The only other part of her that was moving was her fingers, digging holes into a plastic garbage bag. She was telling her American boyfriend that she no longer loved him. I am crying, she whispered into the phone, but that does not mean I love you or that I can stop crying, and all the boyfriend wanted to know in response was if it was because he was from central Florida.
After dinner and before dessert, we began to smell the smoke. Adora accused Jonathan of smoking in the bathrooms. "Adora, sweetheart," Jack said, putting his arm around her, "we"re not in high school anymore."
"Well we have a patio," she said, and she motioned for him to go outside.
It was all too much. Adora and Jonathan had smoked in bathrooms together when they were young. She might have actually known him better than I did. I lifted my head toward Kevin, who was caught up in conversation with a man who worked on the marketing team for 7Up, who didn"t even realize I had stepped next to him, so when Jonathan motioned for me to follow him outside, I traced his wet footsteps. "I need some air," I whispered in Kevin"s ear.
Outside, Jonathan and I leaned against the fence surrounding the pool, where he handed me his cigarette and we blamed everything on the vodka.
"I only smoke because of the vodka," I said.
"I"m only here because of the vodka," he said.
"I go to the bathroom in the middle of dinner because of the vodka."
"I make stupid jokes about contractual integrity and everybody laughs because of the vodka."
"My shoes are ugly and wet because of the vodka."
"I only got married because of the vodka."
The moon was not visible.
"Don"t make it a joke," I said.
"Sometimes, it feels like a joke. It"s true, but yet, still a joke. How can that be?"
The clouds hung heavy in the sky like sacks, distracting us. Everything covered the stars, which seemed like an incredible feat; the whole universe disappeared and, yet, we were still alive, even if it was just for now, everybody was alive for now, even my father.
Adora popped her head outside to accuse us of things. Smoking! Ash! Being cold! Uncivilized! Were we aware that nearly everything we were doing could kill us?
"Isn"t that the fun part?" Jonathan asked.
Adora huffed and went back inside.
"Tell me everything," he said.
"Oh," I said. "I don"t know."
I couldn"t think of one thing except, You loved me. I know he did. Despite everything. And we laughed so hard in the mornings over Algerian coffee, I thought my spleen would erupt like a swollen and diseased organ. But I was too sad, or too drunk, or too defeated to be angry in this way.
"What"s new with you?" I asked.
"Ohhh," Jonathan said, blowing out a puff of smoke. "So much has happened, since. I don"t even think it"s possible to begin."
By that point in the night, the fire had spread to the kitchen cabinets and the maid should have known this earlier, but she was crying so hard her nostrils filled with mucous, and she couldn"t smell a thing, couldn"t articulate a thing. She put her hand against the door to help her stand up. She felt the heat transferring through the door. "Hot!" she told her boyfriend, and her boyfriend didn"t understand. "Kitchen on fire!" she shouted.
The cabinets dripped like paints and Adora would have known this earlier if she weren"t obsessed with checking the upstairs bathrooms for leftover ash in the toilet.
I was having trouble organizing my thoughts. The pool looked cold, like it was alone. Or like it missed the half of the pool that was inside or like it was the pool inside, just split in half like land divided by a highway, like sisters who shared the same blood but never spoke on the phone. Like sisters who didn"t share the same blood but talked every day. How did that happen? Everything felt so split in half. My mother. My father. Laura. Adora. Me. Jack. Jonathan. Were we all supposed to love each other? I slid my hand across the metal rung of the fence back and forth and I was wondering if I was the kind of woman that Mr. Basketball thought I"d turn out to be, if I was the kind of woman Jonathan really wanted to be with, if I was the kind of woman Jack still loved. We were silent. I tried to think of other things, about what it would be like to live inside this giant house where it was impossible, I"m sure, to feel anything but cold, even when it was on fire. He was not able to look at me and I was not able to look at him but we felt the presence of something there between us.
Or maybe we didn"t. I really didn"t know anymore.
The maid said she called 911 as soon as she smelled the smoke, before she even left the food pantry. Orrin said this made her a hero; Adora thought this made her dumb. I agreed with Adora. The kitchen was on fire and when the kitchen was on fire, you just got the h.e.l.l out of the house, like Adora, who popped her head out onto the patio after she announced, "Kitchen is on fire!" as though she were telling us, "Belts are fifty percent off at Cache!" She saw Jonathan"s hand that wasn"t on top of mine, but was next to mine, and our hands were clasped to the rung of the fence. I could feel him sigh like he was disappointed, and shake his head, and grumble, "Kitchen is on fire," as though when you were with a woman, the kitchen was always always on fire.
Jonathan walked into the house, only to leave through the front door, and when he got in his car and drove away, I stood on the lawn and I felt I could breathe again.
I looked for Kevin.
When my mother and Bill showed up, we were outside with the fire trucks and the firemen were inside with their hoses. Bill and my mother were running to us; they were adults who had left their children alone for too long in a house that was too big and this was what they got for it. The fire was under control, the maid was upset in the back of an ambulance trying to explain: "Language barrier," she said to the police. "Much hard." Adora and Orrin were looking at their house and everyone held their breath beside them, and then exhaled as the smoke poured out through the broken windows.
"You"re late," I said to my mother, who was by my side.
"Dear G.o.d," my mother said like she was about to embark on a prayer. Like a prayer is some kind of journey toward something. "What happened?"
Everything. Nothing.
"The Austrian maid broke up with her American boyfriend," I said.
31.
The inside of Orrin"s house was ruined. Everything was covered in smoke. Everything in ashes. They were just going to start over. Build new cabinets, rip out the flooring. The perfect time to start a new life, anyway, Adora said. And I, Adora told me, would be the perfect person to help them.
"I won"t even begin to tell you how much Orrin would pay you," she said. "I"m sure you know."
"I don"t actually," I said.
She wrote it down on a piece of paper, as though she couldn"t bear to say it aloud.