After work Chloe and I go to a coffee shop on Twenty-third and Third for a quick dinner We order cheeseburgers and Cokes and then I tell Chloe about Annette There are only twelve category reviewers, yet somehow she doesn’t know who Annette is Is she the one who always wears sandals, even in the winter? Is she the one who fights with her boyfriend on the phone all day? Is it the cute girl who always leaves early? No one at Intelligentsia is without her skeletons, her embarrassments, her fuck-ups. Except maybe Chloe, whose only sin is downward mobility
Chloe asks, exasperated, “Is it the woman who brings her lunch every day and only eats like, wheatgrass and carrots?”
“That’s me, Chloe.”
“No, I mean the other one.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Wow,” she says. “That’s exactly what Kyra said, right?”
“That I would get a really perky stalker at work?”
“No, that things like this would be happening. Look at it like this: What does Annette represent to you, some issue that you haven’t worked out before?”
“Uh, the fact that I don’t like any of my co-workers?”
Chloe looks annoyed by my lack of faith in Kyra’s predictions. “Anyway,” she says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you, are you still writing? I mean, other than what you do for work.”
“No, not for a long time.”
“Not at all? Because this guy I know from Trout, he’s starting a literary journal and—”
“No, not at all Thanks anyway ”
She shakes her head “You better start paying attention to the signs,” she says. “You don’t want to go through all this shit again when you’re fifty-eight”
Annette rushes into my office the next morning and hurls herself into what has become her chair with a face of anguished, almost manic worry
“Mary,” she says, “why didn’t you tell me about this? I can’t believe you’ve been going through this alone ”
“What?” I’m very focused on my computer as she speaks. I’ve just found a website that delivers custom-made bubble bath
“Your mother, honey, your mother. Now your mother has mental illness too. Why didn’t you tell me about this? You know my door is always open, Mary. You know that.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your mother. I read it in the paper today.” Annette pulls a daily tabloid out of her black purse. It’s folded open to the gossip column on page six. She hands it over to me, pointing at the bottom of page with a pale blue manicured nail.
Evelyn Forrest, New York literary legend and longtime editor of the Greenwich Village Review, has suffered from a mysterious medical malaise for at least six months, sources say Evelyn, who founded GV with the late Michael Forrest in 1963, is said to suffer from memory lapses, disorientation, and emotional distress Rumor has it the already overworked and underpaid staff has had to work overtime to compensate for the once-great Ms Forrest’s lapses No word on a diagnosis as of yet Everyone here at Page Six is praying for a hasty recovery, although the prognosis doesn’t look good
I try to figure out who is responsible for this gossip Lilly Chemper, she works at the paper. Lilly approached my mother last year about publishing a piece in GV, an insider’s look at the gossip industry, and Evelyn declined it. I throw the paper across the room and it thumps nicely against the door Annette says something like I guess I’ll be going now and splits. I think, How dare this fucking gossipmonger print a lie about my mother. I take a box of paper clips and throw it against the door Then a few books, then my in-box. I pick up the phone and slam it back down and then throw the phone across the room. Someone knocks on the door and I say, Please leave me alone. Next goes a cup of pens and a memo pad, then a few more books and a lamp. It’s not only for my mother that I’m so angry—it’s because now it’s real.
When my office is nicely trashed I leave, and spend the rest of the day shopping for black cardigans downtown.
At home that evening I call Evelyn at the office. She’s not upset by the newspaper piece.
“Gossip. I should be flattered, at my age, that anyone wants to gossip about me. Besides, it’s a help in a way. Now it won’t come out of the blue.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, I thought I had told you. I decided I’m going to retire ”
“Oh, Mom—”
“Listen, did I ever tell you the story of how I found out I was pregnant with you?”
She has, she’s told me dozens of times, but I know she wants to tell me again so I say no
“Your father and I went to dinner at La Vignette, a French place we used to like over on Bedford and Barrow. It’s a juice bar now, that corner. Anyway, we got in a terrible fight. I don’t remember what it was about. The magazine, I’m sure. That was the main thing we fought about that year. Nineteen seventy.
“Anyway, after dinner we walked home. It was almost Christmas, and it was very cold No one else was out, and we weren’t speaking. It started to snow, just a little flurry I remember, it was so quiet, I remember thinking that I never would have imagined such quiet in New York City. My stomach started to hurt I thought it was cramps. Of course, I wasn’t speaking to your father, so I didn’t tell him. We got home and I went right to sleep in the bedroom. Your father was going to sleep on the couch, like he always did when we fought. My stomach got worse and worse, I took everything in the medicine cabinet, it’s still getting worse. So I called an ambulance, from the phone in the bedroom Your father slept right through it, I didn’t wake him up.
“So I got to the hospital, and they took some blood and poked and prodded and, to make a long story short, I was pregnant with you, and almost having a miscarriage. I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I was always irregular with my periods. He was starting to get sick again, and most nights he fell asleep on the couch. They wanted to keep me there, in Saint Vincent’s for the rest of the weekend, so I called your father at home. It was morning by now. He was pretty surprised. He didn’t even know I had left the house. He had knocked on the bedroom door a few times, and he thought I still wasn’t speaking to him.”
She tells me this story, again, by way of showing how durable she is under pressure and pain. Pregnant for two months and didn’t even notice Now that’s tough. She tells me this to put my mind at ease, to reassure me that she can take whatever might come her way
“So don’t worry,” she tells me. “This is no big deal I’m gonna have tests and tests and more tests “ Through the telephone I can hear her drawing cigarette smoke deep into her lungs and then pushing it back out through pursed lips. Maybe a little lipstick. Maybe a mauvish, sweet-smelling lipstick. “I guess this is what your father felt like before he died All these tests, these doctors, in and out of the clinics.”
“I guess.”
“Don’t you think it was hard on him?” she says.
“Of course it was hard on him. I know that.”
“Do you think he wanted to be sick like that?”
“No,” I tell her, “of course not.”
“He couldn’t help it, you know.”
“I know. I know ”
She doesn’t believe me and she’s getting upset “You don’t know You don’t remember from before He was a wonderful man. He was tenured before he was thirty, you know.”
“I know”
“You don’t know. You don’t remember He was a genius. I had never met anyone so smart before. He was like an encyclopedia, you could talk to Michael about anything Art, movies, philosophy, history”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. Mary was two when we started the journal. And he always helped, always. We started the magazine together and we raised the girl together He loved her so much We were so close, we were like a regular family. Mary was so smart, right away you could tell, she was her father’s daughter. Oh, he would dress her, take her to play dates, she used to play with Philip Roth’s daughter, John Updike’s kids. I have a picture of him having a tea party with her. He loved her so much. He never meant to hurt her. Never.”
“I know. I know I know I know I know I know I know.”
Yes, it’s real, all right.