The Light of Paris(43)

eleven





MADELEINE


   1999




When I dragged downstairs the morning after my argument with Phillip, my mother was already dressed (including full lipstick) and sitting in my father’s office making phone calls. A yellow legal pad sat in front of her, covered with notes written in her perfect penmanship, and as I came in, she hung up the phone and made another note.

“You haven’t brushed your hair,” she said, looking up at me.

“That was an actual life choice.” I’d woken up with it looking not half bad, and I’d been afraid to touch it. Of course it had gone into its natural curl, which my mother regarded as a failing on the same level of magnitude as, say, becoming a heroin addict, but I couldn’t do anything about that.

My mother glanced back at me, looking as though she had stepped in something. I lifted my voice and changed the subject. “So what are you working on?” I asked, too loudly.

“Don’t shout, I’m right here. I’ve been calling some appraisers.”

“Doesn’t Sharon do that?”

“Not for the house, for the contents. I know you think everything in here is ancient and worthless, but much of it is quite valuable.”

“Wait, where did you get that idea? I don’t think these things are worthless.”

“I’ve seen your house. It’s very . . . modern.” She said the word as though even having it on her tongue disgusted her.

“That wasn’t my choice! It was like that when we moved in. You remember my place here? Before Phillip and I got married? That wasn’t modern.” I felt a pang of sadness when I remembered my apartment in Magnolia, where I had lived after college and before Phillip. I’d almost forgotten I’d once had a home that was wholly mine, and I felt the loss of it with a surprising ferocity.

It had been in one of the older buildings downtown, with gorgeous original parquet floors and French doors opening up on a balcony so charmingly tiny it was unusable. There were three bedrooms, one of which was a guest room no one ever used, one of which was mine, and the master, which I had repurposed as an art studio. My not using the master to sleep in had made my mother absolutely batty, which made me love it even more. My father had disapproved, had wanted to buy me a condo in a newer building, with a doorman and a business center and a more prestigious address. But all that had sounded so complicated, and I had wanted something of my own. And now I hated that I hadn’t known how wonderful it was when I had it.

“Well, if you want anything, you need to let me know before the appraiser comes.”

There were a dozen things I would have loved to have—things I remembered from childhood, pieces my mother had told me the stories of—but where would I put them? I thought of the condo in Chicago, austere and elegant and cold, and shivered.

“Okay,” I said. Scarlett-like, I would think about it tomorrow. “Is that Sharon’s list? What do we need to do next?”

My mother fixed me with the precise tractor beam of her gaze, the same look that had caught me a hundred times over in my childhood, pinning me in place and pulling the truth from me. “Why do you keep saying ‘we’? What’s going on? Is everything all right with Phillip?”

Oh, dear. That was such a very, very large question. There were so many things that were not all right with Phillip, and even more things that were not all right with Phillip and me. And perhaps an even longer list of things that were not all right with me individually. But I had no interest in exploring those subjects with my mother. Or, more likely, at all.

“He’s fine,” I said. And wasn’t that true? Phillip was always fine. And Phillip would always be fine, because to Phillip, there was absolutely nothing wrong with him. Any problem, any difficulty, any flaw belonged to someone else. “I just want to make sure you’re taken care of.”

She looked at me for another long moment, coolly appraising. “Is there something you want to talk to me about?” Leaning back in the chair, she put down her pen and crossed her arms on her chest. The chair squeaked and another rush of sadness came over me as I was reminded of my father’s absence. I’d had a hundred conversations with him in his office, just like this. Him sitting in his chair behind his desk, leaning back so it squeaked, me sitting in one of the chairs across from him, as if I were one of his clients and not his daughter, though it had never felt that way.

Between my parents, my father had been the soft touch. He had always talked to me as if I were an adult, and when I had been in trouble, I’d always gone to him first, and we’d work out some solution, and then he’d offer me a piece of candy from the jar on his desk, walk me to the door, and send me back out to play.

I opened and closed my mouth a few times. “It’s complicated.” I couldn’t imagine saying to her that Phillip and I were miserable, that he had threatened to divorce me, and even though he had backpedaled, in the meantime I had become half convinced it was a good idea. I didn’t know how she would respond. My mother and I had never been that honest with each other.

“Marriage is difficult, you know,” she said, and her voice was unusually sentimental. My mother would needle at me and pick at me and criticize my hair and make exhaustive lists of all the things I was doing wrong, but she was still my mother, which meant there was an eternal flame lit inside me in honor of the moments when she didn’t see me as something broken to fix. My heart lifted slightly. Maybe I could tell her. We could actually have this conversation, and she would help me figure it out.