Alternate Side(23)
So Nora mentioned the poop bags only at her women’s lunch. She should have known the others would be somewhat unsympathetic. All of them lived in apartment buildings, with doormen who would make short work of anyone trying to leave a tissue on the sidewalk in front, much less a bag of dog leavings. “Not while we’re eating, for Christ’s sake,” Elena said when Nora was talking, waving her hand in the air.
“Do you know an architect named James Mortimer?” Suzanne asked Nora. “I’m decorating a house that he designed, and when I said one of my girlfriends had been at Williams he said that you two were friends in college.”
“We were,” Nora said.
“What kind of friends?” Suzanne said.
“What’s the house?” Nora said, instead of answering.
“What can I say, a total nightmare. One of those hedge fund guys with a second wife bought two walk-up buildings downtown and had them razed to build something with eight bedrooms, a green roof, and a lap pool. Aluminum.”
“Why would anyone want an aluminum lap pool?” Jenny said.
“Not the lap pool, the house. Very modern, angular, the kind of thing that will wind up in some magazine. The wife was an art history major and thinks she knows what she’s doing. The only thing that’s keeping her under control is that I think she’s crushing on your friend James. I just hope she doesn’t sleep with him and blow the whole deal up. It’s a good job for me in a lot of ways. It will get a lot of attention, and they don’t care what anything costs. And working with James—”
“I want a detailed explanation of how you’re going to furnish this place,” said Jenny, who had less interest in furniture than anyone Nora knew but wanted Suzanne to natter on about grass cloth and glass tile instead of James Mortimer, which was exactly what happened. As they walked out together, Jenny muttered, “Jesus, this city is like Mayberry. Everyone knows everyone else, especially the people you don’t want them to know. Especially James goddamn Mortimer.”
“It’s fine, Jen,” Nora said. “How’s Jasper?”
“Good. He’s auditing one of my classes.”
“Really?”
“The one on fertility and pregnancy in various cultures. He doesn’t have time to come to class, but he does all the readings and he says he even wants to do the paper. Can you imagine a surer way to kill a relationship? ‘Sorry, babe, but this is a B-minus at best.’?”
“Are you actually in a relationship?”
“I think maybe I am. Isn’t that weird? What about you? You seem a little fried.”
“I’m fine. I just wish someone would stop leaving poop bags in front of my house.”
“That’s weird and creepy, and I say that as someone who has never even owned a dog. Is that the right term? Do we still own dogs, or is that, I don’t know, speciesist? And if I can’t say you own a dog anymore, does that mean we’re all officially insane? We are, aren’t we? Totally insane. I used to be a radical feminist, and the other day one of my students dismissed me as a straight establishment woman.”
“Sometimes I think Homer owns us,” Nora said. “I don’t think we’d even live where we live if it wasn’t for Homer.”
It was true: in a way, Homer was responsible for their life on the block. His arrival had dovetailed with a period when Charlie had believed that he was on the verge of becoming (pick one, depending on degree of intoxication) a top gun, a macher, a rainmaker, a big swinging dick. They were living in a nice-enough three-bedroom apartment, and with a big bump in the real estate market their equity in their place had doubled. Add a boom-year bonus, and Charlie became obsessed with the idea that they should have a place more conducive to parties, dinners. He’d actually used the word entertaining two or three times.
But virtually all of the co-ops they looked at had a no-dog policy, and eventually their real estate agent had taken them to see the house. “No board approval, no financials,” she said to Charlie, as though they might be drug dealers, but the long vista of the second-floor double parlor answered Charlie’s vision of successful cocktail parties. They had had a party the second year they’d lived there, and the wife of a partner at a law firm, with whom Charlie did a lot of business at the time, looked around with a glass of wine in her hand and said with a sigh, “I’ve always wanted to live in a house exactly like this.” Charlie had expanded before Nora’s eyes, as though the woman had attached a bicycle pump and, one, two, three, created a chestier, prouder, bigger man.
While Nora’s ambition was a thing so ephemeral as to be nearly nonexistent, Charlie had had a strong sense of what he wanted, although Nora thought life would have been simpler if his goal had had a title: judge, senior partner. Instead Nora had realized early on that he simply wanted to be somebody. Charlie’s father, an accountant who did the taxes of the locals in their smallish upstate town out of a basement home office with a separate side entrance, had an older brother who managed a steel processing plant, a towering figure among the Nolans, discussed as though he were a hair’s breadth from great wealth and stature. Charlie had realized that Uncle Glenn’s life, and not making an April 15 filing deadline for the principal of the high school and the chief of police, was what was desirable.
Nora had met Uncle Glenn exactly twice, once at her wedding, another time at a family reunion. It was considered a great coup that Glenn, who was so very busy, had managed to travel from Pittsburgh to Albany. After his third vodka gimlet, he had told Nora that he had always wanted to be a writer, but that, “events being what they were,” he had been obliged to major in business in college. “And, well,” he added with the Kabuki modesty that his extended family frequently lauded, “it all turned out for the best.” Nora always suspected that his position was less than described, although enough for European vacations and a new Cadillac every three years, which at the time were definite markers of prosperity, along with a mink coat for the wife. But his legend was deep in her husband’s DNA. Nora wondered if that was one of the things Charlie had come to like about the block: that on the block he was known, valued, somebody.