Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(27)

The waiter returned to take our food orders. I sat there mute as he looked at Max, then at me, and I realized that Max wasn’t going to order for me. How could he? I hadn’t told him what I wanted, and I was not his wife anymore. He ordered for another woman now.

The other woman. Julia. His second bride to be. Younger, conspicuously, merely thirty-nine, and easy to be around—just happy, so happy, Max had said when he’d given me the news of their impending nuptials. And I had to agree; she had a beautiful smile, if you like people who have thousands of teeth and no evident capacity to ever be sad.

“Madam?” the waiter said, prompting me.

“Steak, please,” I said. “Medium well.”

I’d meant to say “medium rare.” But who cared? I didn’t correct myself. It had been awkward enough to place an incorrect order.

I watched Max ask the waiter which of three popular options he’d most recommend, and I thought how young he seemed. Not boyish, per se, but not old. Not like me. I wondered how the waiter saw me. Did my pause strike him as doddering? Did I register to him at all? He was in his early thirties, probably, and I suspected that I had for him the relative invisibility of a woman of a certain age and face. I used to be beautiful, I wanted to scream. I used to be quick.

Once, shortly after I moved to Manhattan, I accompanied Helen to the Met; she was looking for exemplars for her own sketches, bulking up her illustration portfolio in the hope of being more hirable. We were saturated, supersaturated, with art that day: so much craft and artifice all in one place. But the piece I remembered most indelibly—at the time, and ever after—was called “A Speedy & Effectual Preparation for the Next World.” It was an etching of an old woman applying rouge at her dressing-table, oblivious to the approach of skeletal Death behind her. A tiny funeral cortege drawn by racing coursers coasted down her architectural eighteenth-century hair. She was a figure of satire; as an onlooker, one was meant to laugh at her vanity. But I did not laugh: Even at twenty-seven, I didn’t find it funny. Even then I’d begun to think—and to push away the thought—that committing oneself to being fashionable was simultaneously committing oneself to being perishable.

I thought of that image as I was looking across the table at Max, at him looking back at me, old me, much older me: fifty-six. Max was born in 1906 and thus had always been—would always be—younger than I, by six years if I lied about my age, as I always did, or by seven if I was honest, which I was only in the privacy of my mind.

He still looked as handsome as an Italianate statue. His few wrinkles brought out the deeper character of his face, as verdigris did on aging metal. Me, though: I was well dressed and thin, but because I’d just gotten out of the hospital it was a sagging thinness, not sharp but haggard. Unfair, unfair.

At least the light in there was flatteringly dim. Lowish ceilings decorated with wedding-cake moldings, everyone dressed to impress upon the eye the ideas that yes, they had money and yes, they had style. Chandeliers and wooden chairs.

“So,” said Max. “I don’t mean for this to be too much of a business lunch, since most things are sorted. But I guess we ought to discuss what we’ve got to discuss.”

“Of course,” I said, reaching into my pocketbook. “I typed up that letter you asked for. The one for Johnny’s orthodontist.”

“That bastard orthodontist,” said Max. “Thanks.”

Despite our split and my recent incapacity, Max still relied on me to perform certain tasks for our son, almost all of which were really tasks for Max himself. Correspondence was one. I didn’t mind—or if I did mind, I didn’t hesitate. Partly because it was gratifying to still be adept at something. Partly, too, because I didn’t want Johnny to be harmed by Max’s indelicacy. But mostly, at least in this case, because I could scarcely bear the thought of incivility occurring anywhere it could be avoided.

“Shall I read it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I always like hearing you perform your work.”

“All right,” I began. “‘Dear Joel. We have been friends for many, many years; hence, I feel that I can be perfectly frank with you to state my displeasure in suddenly receiving a bill covering three years of orthodontia work on Junior in the amount of $415.00. Now Joel, it must be obvious to you that you do not suddenly sock a guy with a $400 bill for work going over three years and never submit an interim bill. Without being facetious, what I should say to you is: If it takes your staff three years to bill me, it will take my staff three years to pay you. It will be paid. Have no concern, but I do not like surprises of this sort. I feel assured that you will agree with me that pay as you go is by far the best principle. Signed, Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo.’”

“That’s perfect, Lillian. Pitch-perfect,” said Max. “Thank you. That’s exactly what I wanted to say. I couldn’t figure out how to make it—”

“Forceful,” I said.

“Forceful, yeah. But still with the right amount of—”

“Grace,” I said. I folded the letter and passed it to him. “I left the signature blank for you, obviously. And I typed up the envelope, but you’ll have to get the stamp.”

The judge had decided that Johnny should continue to live with me for most of the year, being as I was the mother, and being as he’d soon start high school and moving would be disruptive. Plus Johnny did not want to leave me. While I did not want him to stay out of pity, I was in no position to be choosy, so if pity was what motivated him, fine: I’d take it. I couldn’t bear for him and Max to both abandon me. Summers he’d spend with Max and Julia, an annual three-month absence I was already dreading, though it was only autumn. Not to mention my preemptive jealousy that they’d get Johnny when he was totally free and would therefore enjoy his company uninterrupted.