Alternate Side(16)
“What does Jasper do?” Nora had asked Jenny in the kitchen.
“He’s a cabinetmaker. Also a voice-over actor and a dialect coach.”
“Promise me he’s not also a mime. Anything but a mime.”
Jenny put cheese and grapes on a platter. “Would I sleep with a mime?” she said.
“You slept with that circus clown.”
“That was a long time ago. And I was really drunk.”
In the car on the way home Nora said to Charlie, “You seemed to get on with him.”
“He’s a smart guy,” Charlie said. “He’s kind of wasted making kitchen cabinets but, hey, who am I to talk. Jenny’ll have a nice kitchen, and he’ll get whatever. I wonder if he charges less if you’re sleeping with him while he’s doing your kitchen.”
“Wait, I knew she was redoing her kitchen, but I didn’t know the guy she was dating was the contractor.”
“She’s your best friend. How come you don’t already know this? And is ‘dating’ a term that ever applies to Jenny?” Charlie had always found Jenny’s promiscuity threatening, as though it were a communicable disease, as though Nora were going to have breakfast with Jenny and then give a man she met in the coffee shop line a blow job in the restroom.
“My best friend is seeing the man who is redoing her kitchen,” Nora said to Sherry Fisk now, not meaning to say it aloud until she’d already done so. “Seeing. Sleeping with. What do we call it now?”
“I bet it will be a great kitchen,” Sherry said.
“You have to do something to make a kitchen renovation bearable,” said Alma Fenstermacher, who had stopped to join them. She stared for a moment at the scrum at the end of the street, then walked on, perhaps, Nora thought, to attend church. Alma seemed like the sort of person to attend church on Sunday.
“Why do I like her?” Sherry said. “I shouldn’t like her. She’s so—”
“Perfect,” Nora said. “You can tell her closets are always tidy. See, tidy—that’s a word I’ve probably never used before to describe anyone, but it’s perfect for Alma. She’s a throwback to another era, before we wore workout clothes all the time and used profanity. She’s perfect and yet she’s perfectly nice. It’s impossible not to like her.”
The Con Ed truck rumbled down the street, and the men at the lot entrance began to disperse. “I have to tell you, I’m grateful for this,” Sherry said, gesturing down the street. “At least it gives my husband something else to obsess about. This whole thing with the parking lot is a metaphor for his entire life right now. These guys have no life except for their jobs. So without their jobs they have no life. Jack gets out of bed mad and goes to bed mad. I think he’s mad in his dreams.”
“Yikes,” said Nora again, but she couldn’t help nodding.
Nora thought Charlie’s dissatisfaction with his work and therefore his life had begun to grow with his fiftieth birthday two years before. She had hosted a dinner for twenty at an expensive restaurant they both liked, but her husband had so much to drink that he started to sob during Oliver’s toast (“And it wasn’t even that good,” Rachel said the next day) and fell asleep with his mouth open in the back of the car on the way home.
Charlie was an investment banker. It had become enough to say that, at parties, in conversation. No one really knew what that meant except other finance guys, and they liked the fact that they spoke a secret language that others, especially women, couldn’t understand. Nora had made it her business to listen carefully to the long, discursive stories he told at dinner about deals, firms, personalities, possibilities, but it was all too boring. At a certain point simply pretending to listen, looking attentive, nodding and umming from time to time, seemed like enough of a sacrifice. So Charlie would say, “You’re not going to believe this one…” and Nora would go elsewhere in her mind: replacement of the living room drapes, bong in Oliver’s bedroom drawer, press for the upcoming exhibit. She’d gotten good at it: Charlie would say in the dark at night, “Remember that deal I told you Jim and I were working on?” And Nora would say, “Yes, of course,” and start umming again, and he’d be content.
Rachel had begged Charlie to be one of the parents at career day at her school when she was in third grade, one of the phases of Oedipal transference in which she thought her father was handsome and brilliant and her mother was nobody and had stupid hair. The two of them had come home at the end of the day, each wearing the expression of someone sorely disappointed.
“Apparently I am a bad explainer,” Charlie said, filling a glass with ice cubes and vodka and yanking Rachel’s favorite pink-patterned tie, the one with wolves in sheep’s clothing, through the lariat of his collar. Rachel had already started upstairs to her bedroom. “A horrible explainer,” she yelled, before slamming the door. “Even I can’t really explain what Daddy does,” Nora said later, when she was tucking her in, but Rachel said, turning to the wall, “Then he shouldn’t have come to school to talk about it.”
Increasingly what Charlie talked about was what he called “the short-pants boys,” by which he meant the young associates, some of whom prospered to what Charlie insisted was a laughable degree by means ranging from nepotism to ass-kissing to dirty-dealing. Charlie had once been one of those young men, and while he had done his share of ass-kissing, he had at first prospered because he shone with simple decency, which was still the case and owed more to fair hair and skin than anyone ever realized. Over the years his colleagues had waited for the shark to emerge from behind the nice guy, the wolf in sheep’s clothing to make an appearance, the open-faced mask to drop. Nora suspected that when they realized it was not a mask at all, they had begun to value Charlie less. She never mentioned those early years, when, as he liked to say, the sky was the limit.