The red book, p.3
The Red Book, page 3
In between all this, she squeezed in time to paint, and she continued to answer the question “What do you do?” with “I’m an artist,” even though personal assistant or short-order cook would have been more accurate. Then one day, just after her thirty-fifth birthday, she was stooping to pick up her dog’s poop, another chore from which Gunner recused himself, when she spotted a flyer advertising the solo show of a girl from her childhood building who’d still been in diapers when Addison was in middle school. It suddenly struck her, like an anvil to the skull, that a whole decade had passed without so much as an exhibition or a sale or even a group show at one of the lesser homespun galleries in her neighborhood. So she pulled Gunner aside and said, “Enough.” He was now officially the age at which he’d originally said he wanted to have kids, so she expected his equal participation as a line worker in the family factory. But by then Gunner had grown so used to the status quo, his domestic muscles had atrophied.
“Outsource it,” he said. “I’m on the brink of something great.”
He was able to suggest this solution, when neither spouse was bringing in money, because both he and Addison were the beneficiaries of small trust funds left to them by their grandparents. Gunner’s parents also paid both for the children’s tuition at St. Ann’s and for their North 3rd Street loft, which was purchased in their name—in cash and in full—back in 1995 when the then-young couple decided to trade up from their one-bedroom in Alphabet City to 3,400 square feet of raw space in the then up-and-coming but still transitional neighborhood in Brooklyn when Addison was pregnant with Trilby. “A great investment,” Gunner’s father had declared, his voice echoing off the walls as he placed his hand firmly on the sturdy column supporting what would become his son and daughter-in-law’s living room, a statement that both time and the Williamsburg real estate market had proven prescient. Their $250,000 loft was now worth, well, who knew with this crazy market? But before the collapse, the apartment below theirs, which was slightly smaller and didn’t have a balcony, sold for $2.1 million.
So Addison hired more help. The housekeeper started coming in three times a week. A college kid was employed to help with after-school pickups and children’s activities. Groceries were purchased online and delivered straight into their kitchen. A tutor was located to help Trilby with her dyslexia and Houghton with his math. A therapist was hired for the many months it took to help Thatcher work through his night terrors, and a dog walker showed up every day at midday. But still Addison felt frustrated by Gunner’s lack of participation on the home front. “Gunner, please,” she said. “What about if you cook dinner, and I’ll clean the dishes? You were always a much better cook than me anyway. Or maybe you could take the kids to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Or to a birthday party now and then. Or I could deal with the pediatrician and you could do the dentist. You get the better deal there, trust me, because they only have to go to the dentist twice a year.”
But Gunner held his ground. “My parents never took me to the doctor,” he said. “The nanny did.”
“That’s not the point,” said Addison.
“Please, Ad, I’m on the verge of a significant breakthrough in my work.”
“What about my work, huh? What about my breakthroughs?”
“Nothing’s keeping you from making art but you,” said Gunner. A strange sentiment coming from a stalled writer, but also—Addison was loath to admit—partially true. Ever since Thatcher had entered kindergarten, she had five to six hours a day during which she could have chosen to ignore the ambient noise in her head, but for whatever reason, she couldn’t.
And try as she might, both alone and with the Jungian, she could not figure out why. “I’m so angry at my husband!” she’d yell from the couch. Or, “Maybe I’m too stupid to figure out what I want to say with my work. I often wonder if every branch of my family tree hadn’t all gone to Harvard whether I would have even been admitted.” Or, “Most of the artists who succeed have some sort of gimmick. Keith Haring with his cartoon babies. Matthew Barney with his Cremaster Cycle. I need a gimmick. Or a penis. Or whatever.” Or, “Fuck it. Maybe I should just throw in the towel and get a normal job like everyone else.”
This last part she added in for the benefit of her shrink, so he would think his patient was making progress—yeah, right, she thought as she said it, like anyone would ever hire me to do a regular job—but for several weeks afterward she dreamt she was a graphic designer working in a cool glass and steel office in SoHo, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and the leather jacket Bennie had picked out for her at that thrift shop just off Bow Street near Adams House. She would wake up from these dreams with intense longing.
“It’s not the luau I care about, sweetheart.” She pronounces sweetheart harshly, like an epithet. “It’s the people at the luau. My old friends from college. The ones I haven’t seen in twenty years?”
“Oh, please, Ad,” says Gunner, laughing. “Stop being such a drama queen. You see them all the time.”
“I’m not just talking about Clover and the gang.” Aside from the random dinner in the city with Clover once or twice a year, Addison, Clover, and their other two roommates, Mia and Jane, have been making a retreat, every year for the past ten, to Clover’s weekend house in East Hampton, from which Addison always comes back to the city both refreshed from the multiple massages, mani/pedis, and yoga classes Clover insists on providing gratis but also agitated, in some unnamable way, by being waited upon so overtly. At the Hunt summer house in Deer Isle, Maine, in the compound that’s been in Addison’s family for six generations, most of the help disappeared after her father’s death, and the woman who stayed on made herself scarce whenever the family was around. Gunner’s family’s retreat on Block Island, which his great-grandfather established in 1896, still employs a few caretakers and cooks, whose salaries are paid out of the family trust, but they are the kind of help who come and go undetected, save for the freshly folded towels stacked in the linen closet or the magical disappearance of the grit and sand from the bottom of the bathtub or the freshly baked blueberry muffins left to cool on a wire rack every morning at dawn. The idea of an eager fleet of young Filipinas arriving at 10 A.M. each day to file and buff everyone’s nails, to rub oils into their skin, to wax their pubic hairs so openly, so interactively, is anathema to the way Addison was taught the help should help.
But Clover, who grew up several inches below the poverty line, could be forgiven for not understanding such nuances and for wanting to make grand shows of largesse. She’d had an image in her head of what extreme wealth looked like, she once told Addison, born of watching TV shows such as Dallas and Dynasty on the sly as a child—on sleepovers where the parents allowed TVs or, soundless, in front of the appliance store in Novato. And she’d decided she wanted every glittery drop of it, shoulder pads and all.
“There are at least thirty or forty people I was really close to, yes, including Bennie, if she decides to come,” continues Addison, “most of whom I haven’t seen since we all left Cambridge right after Bush Senior took office. That’s a long time ago, Guns. The Berlin Wall was still up. I’m looking forward to this weekend, so let’s drop the cynicism, okay?”
The driver in front of her hesitates, and she misses the light once more. “Move the fuck out of the way!” she screams. “What is WRONG with you people?”
“Mom, Jesus, chill,” says Trilby, behind bangs she recently dyed pink. “It’s a friggin’ luau.” She’d wanted to stay back in Williamsburg to go to a horrorcore rap show on Saturday night, but Addison had insisted she come with the family. “I don’t care if Dismembered Fetus is playing at Pete’s Candy Store, you’re coming with us, and that’s final,” she’d shouted at her daughter, sounding so much like her own mother that time momentarily collapsed on itself—it had been doing that a lot lately—although really, horrorcore? At least the Dead shows that accompanied her own years of teenage angst and rebellion were not actually about Death with a capital D but rather about Peace and Love and, okay, yes, altered states of consciousness, but the good kind.
As far as she could tell, having done some primitive research online after her daughter became infatuated with the genre—her firstborn daughter! who used to cry and bury her head in her blankie whenever the Wicked Witch appeared on The Wizard of Oz!—horrorcore was, at its horrible core, a celebration of murder, rape, Satan, mutilation, and cannibalism, replete with loud, atonal music and a dash of crystal meth. Hence Addison’s insistence that Trilby apply to St. Paul’s, her and Gunner’s alma mater. At least there, she figures, the type of drugs she’ll ingest will expand her mind instead of rotting her teeth.
“Trilby, please. I don’t need your snarky commentary right now, okay?” She glances into the rearview mirror to catch her daughter’s kohl-outlined eyes, and the two stare at one another with mutual incredulity. In the row of seats behind Trilby’s, she notices that Thatcher has fallen asleep on Houghton’s lap, while Houghton is using his younger brother’s head to prop up Addison’s iPhone. “Houghton, don’t drain the battery too much longer, pumpkin, okay? We might need it.”
“Five more minutes?” he asks.
She and Houghton have always had an uncomplicated, easy rapport, the kind she’d always assumed she’d have with her daughters. But with Trilby playing the goth, and Thatcher’s anxiety and innate shyness requiring medication, of late, to help him sleep, stay in school, and navigate even the most banal social interactions, Addison is left with just one child who even remotely resembled the type of offspring she’d imagined pre-them. “Sure, five more minutes, my sweet. What are you playing?”
“Mayhem,” he says, shooting a Nazi zombie in the heart.
“It’s not one of those shooting games, is it?”
“It’s educational, about World War II,” says her son, not wanting to lie to his mother outright.
That’s when she spots it, just as the light turns yellow: a hole in the traffic. She guns the engine, as the light turns red—cue the siren—and plows through.
* * *
ARCHIBALD BUCKNELL GARDNER IV. Home Address: 450 Morgan Place, Oyster Bay, NY 11771 (516-672-8976).
ARABELLA DEBEVOISE GARDNER. Home Address: 450 Morgan Place, Oyster Bay, NY 11771 (516-672-8976). E-mail: arabella gardner@aol.com. Spouse/Partner: Archibald Bucknell Gardner IV (B.A., Harvard ’89; M.B.A., ibid. ’92). Spouse/Partner Occupation: CEO, Gardner Industries, Inc. Children: Archibald Bucknell V, 1994; Eloise Mason, 1996; Caroline Pearce, 1999; Charles Case, 2001.
Bucky and I will be celebrating our nineteenth wedding anniversary this spring. We live in Oyster Bay with our four children. I serve on the board of their school.
* * *
Chapter 2
Clover
Clover never met an excuse to dress up she hasn’t embraced: weddings, the opera, Halloween, toga parties, Christmas, black-tie benefits, white-tie benefits, New Year’s Eve, that time she was out in LA for work several years back, and Mia told her to wear all white and join her family for the closing ceremony of Yom Kippur, the one that sounded like a Russian cabdriver pronouncing the Nilla in Nilla Wafers, and they both held hands and teared up watching Mia’s three sons walking down the aisle of the synagogue carrying their flashlight candles—Mia because even though she was a bacon-eating, twice-a-year Jew, she was thinking about the generations of Jews that came before her, and how centuries of hatred had nearly wiped them out, and yet just look at her three living, breathing sons in their baseball-themed yarmulkes, carrying the torch into the future with all those other pint-size offshoots of the tribes of Israel, but also because absent from that twinkling parade was the one thing life had denied her: a daughter; Clover because she was getting to that age when the window for having a child of her own was growing narrower, and witnessing such a flagrant show of her contemporaries’ productivity flooded her with a toxic brew of desire and jealousy, which was tempered only and somewhat pathetically, she knew (she knew!), by the realization that none of the women in that synagogue looked as physically striking in their white frocks as she. Even now, at forty-two—with her giraffe legs, her gym-toned arms, her still-smooth skin, her salon-straightened hair framing a fine-boned jaw, and the oddity of those cerulean eyes parked in the middle of a dark-skinned face—she was still asked, on occasion, if she modeled.
All this to say that when Clover signed up for the reunion online and saw not only that the Friday night cocktail party in the Kirkland House courtyard had a luau theme but also that Bucky Gardner would be in attendance, she headed straight to Calypso to find the perfect tunic. Something in light blue, she asked the salesperson, to bring out the color in her eyes. Bucky’s wife Arabella, or so she’d heard, had not aged well. Rumor had it that she was an alcoholic (no surprise there) and that the decades of smoking and meal purging had taken their toll on her skin and teeth. Clover, though newly and relievedly married, wanted Bucky to see, really see, if only on the most superficial level possible, the depths of his mistake.
“Clover Love. How the heck are you?” says Bucky, nearly bumping into her after emerging from the Kirkland House bathroom in what seemed like a random encounter but wasn’t. Clover had seen him heading to the men’s room and had planted herself directly in front of the door, pretending to be deeply engaged with her BlackBerry. A ridiculous ruse, as she and her device were no longer the Siamese twins they used to be, back when Lehman was still a bank, and she still had a job.
She suddenly wishes Danny were here with her, instead of traveling for work, if only to show Bucky that she, Clover Love, has been deemed reworthy of her last name. “Bucky! Oh my God. Is that you!” The two embrace in the type of respectful-but-familiar hug practiced by those who were once on a first-name basis with each other’s reproductive organs.
“Yeah, it’s me.” Bucky points to the plastic-covered name tag—ARCHIBALD BUCKNELL GARDNER IV, a name that still astonishes Clover with its audacity—hanging around his neck, its cheap, elastic lanyard caught in the lapel of Bucky’s luau-inappropriate blue blazer. Unlike Clover, Bucky has never met an excuse to dress up in anything other than a coat and tie he has embraced. And nearly always begrudgingly at that.
Clover catches herself reflexively reaching out to free Bucky’s lanyard from the V-shaped trap as the two finally stand face-to-face, examining the scuffs and hollows of time and gravity on each other’s surfaces. “Sorry,” she says. “I can’t help myself. If it makes you feel any better, I walk up to random strangers on the subway and fix their shirt collars.”
“Hmm,” says Bucky. “I wonder what Freud would have to say about that?”
“Tons,” she says, thinking, since when has Bucky Gardner ever given a passing thought to the unconscious?
The electronic beat of the Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” bounces from wall to wall as Bucky chuckles, politely, and stares for just a beat longer than appropriate at the wreath of plumeria resting in the delicate valley of Clover’s chest. “Nice lei,” he says.
Clover nearly chokes on her half-swallowed sip of wine. “Speaking of Freud.”
“No, I meant”—he reddens—“the flowers. You know, l-e-i, not l-a- . . .” He quickly scrambles to dig himself out. “Look at you. You haven’t aged a day.”
“Thanks. And—” Clover nearly returns the compliment but knows Bucky would immediately sense her disingenuousness. Bucky Gardner has not only aged more than a day, he’s aged more decades than the four he’s weathered. His once lean midsection has grown a small paunch, noticeable in the pull of the bottom buttons of his blue oxford. His skin has a grayish, sallow hue, as if he’d spent the past twenty years in an underground bunker. The dense forest of strawberry blond hair that used to flop just beneath his left eye, such that the whipping of his head back to clear his vision could become tic-like if he went too long between haircuts, looks as if it has been razed by a fire and replaced with the scorched nubs of gray twigs. “You look good, too,” she says. This, at least, is not untrue. He does look good. Really good. For a sixty-year-old man.
“And you’re a phenomenal liar, Pace.” He emphasizes the last word and presses his lips between his teeth to try to keep a smile at bay.
“Man oh man, Gardner, you’re never going to let me live that one down, are you?” She crosses her arms and shakes her head before shoving him, playfully.
“Nope. Never . . .” Bucky finally frees his mouth to smile, and rays of his buoyant young self push through the slate brume. “Pace.”
* * *
Pace became Bucky’s de facto pet name for Clover after he mispronounced it the night they met, rhyming it with race, as it appeared on the page, instead of pronouncing it double syllabically, Italian-style—pah’-chay—as her peacenik parents intended. “So, Pace . . . ,” Bucky had said, pointing to the middle name printed under her photo in the freshman facebook after having planted himself on the lumpy couch in her Canaday dorm room to wait for Addison. Jane was out at a comp meeting at the Crimson, Mia was off at an audition for The Cherry Orchard, so Clover was left, once again—not that she minded—entertaining yet another spoke in the endless circle of Addison’s East Coast prep school friends and acquaintances, all of whom kept dropping by the room to see if she was in, which, due to the intense intermingling of said circle during those first heady weeks of school, she hardly ever was. Bucky’s sockless, blucher-shod feet were propped up on a tapestry-covered board atop two LP-filled milk crates, which Addison had fashioned into a coffee table, when he asked the question that would forever define for Clover both the future of their relationship and everything about Harvard that made her feel like a visitor from Planet Kumbaya. “. . . Any relation to the Pace Gallery?”
