It was the last Saturday of the month, which meant the Rashkins had to visit Elsbeth’s Papa Sol and Nana Ruth in Larchmont, which in turn meant they were all in a foul mood. Elsbeth’s mother, June, a real estate agent who specialized in “home facelifts,” redecorating houses to sell them for more money, was cranky because she had to take a valuable weekend day away from her clients. Elsbeth’s dad, Peter, who once upon a time had been tense about the Saturday visits for a similar reason—they had removed him from his restaurant, the Claremont—now disliked them because they disrupted his schedule of sleeping all day and testing recipes for his cookbook by night. Elsbeth herself dreaded going to Larchmont because of (a) her parents; (b) her grandparents—although Sol and Ruth weren’t her grandparents, really, they were her dad’s cousins or something, but they doted upon Elsbeth as if she were a toddler still in diapers instead of almost sixteen—and (c) the battle between June and Elsbeth over what Elsbeth was going to wear. When Elsbeth was little, the issue had been moot: Elsbeth had to dress for Larchmont in frocks Ruth sent, of taffeta or scratchy lace, quite unlike her usual and preferred OshKosh overalls or shorts. But now, as with every time Elsbeth left the house, she had to try to sneak her sartorial choices past her mother.
This morning, for instance: “Oh no no no no no,” said June, when she caught Elsbeth darting across the kitchen in a hot pink T-shirt, lace capri leggings, and a white rhinestone belt. “That outfit is all wrong for you; that waistband hits you just at the wrong place, and the belt emphasizes your double stomach.” “That’s your opinion, Mother,” said Elsbeth, whereupon June said, “That’s right, and I’m the expert. Go upstairs and put something else on.” “No,” said Elsbeth. “Yes,” said June. “I categorically refuse,” said Elsbeth, and June said, “Fine, have it your way, but no phone for a month,” and Elsbeth said, “You are hateful,” and June said, “I’m just trying to help you, darling.” As Elsbeth stomped out, making the dishes rattle in the cupboards, June had called, “And don’t trample, like an elephant. Wear my new dress—it’s on the back of my closet door.”
Elsbeth hadn’t been sure whether this command was a concession or a way to make sure all her embarrassing rolls and bulges were covered; June’s latest purchase was a white calf-length thing with tiered ruffles. Elsbeth had yanked it off its hanger and on over her head, then gone to her own room, where she sat eating Doritos and Bacos from her stash in the roof of her old dollhouse. Both foods would have horrified Peter and June had they known about them, for different reasons. Elsbeth had crunched all the Bacos straight from their jar.
Now in the back seat of the family Volvo, Elsbeth regretted it: her stomach beneath June’s dress pooched out like the bellies of the Ethiopian orphans in the Save the Children commercials; she felt fatter and more uncomfortable than ever. It was about 800 degrees and 900 percent humidity, so hazy that Elsbeth could barely see the steel web of the George Washington Bridge, and the air conditioner of the old Volvo, a hand-me-down from Sol, was broken. Elsbeth tugged the elastic neckline of June’s dress down around her shoulders. On June, who was tall and angular and looked, despite her new perm, like Christie Brinkley, the dress was a Grecian column. On Elsbeth, it made her look like a sturdy peasant about to stomp a tub of grapes. Elsbeth pulled the neckline down more, beneath her clavicle, and fanned herself with her hand.
They were almost to the tollbooths now, inching forward in a metal sea of vehicles all doing the same thing. Waves of heat shimmered from hoods and roofs; radios babbled from everywhere, Spanish music, Casey Kasem’s Top 40, 1010 WINS. They were in an official heat wave, with dangers of a brownout in the greater metropolitan area; tempers were short all over. Elsbeth’s parents were no exception. “I hate these command performances,” June was complaining. “Especially with Sol’s artsy-fartsy crowd.”
Peter tried to cut into the left lane—his trick was to look for the line with trucks in it, since the length of one eighteen-wheeler equaled four cars, and technically, this meant they would reach the toll faster. “Don’t even think abouddit, cocksucker!” yelled the driver in the Honda next to them, and shot Peter the finger.
“Same to you,” said June and returned the gesture.
“June,” said Peter. “Is that really the brightest thing to do when we are completely boxed in?”
June lit a cigarette. “I didn’t want to just let him get away with it,” she muttered, “unlike some people.”
They rolled forward three inches and stopped. teaneck, Elsbeth read off a nearby sign: green, light blue, navy, yellow, light blue, mustard yellow, orange. Those were the colors of the letters—it was a little habit she had, a trick she used to distract herself when the situation she was stuck in seemed unbearable.
“I don’t see why you and Elsbeth couldn’t go without me,” said June. “You know they don’t really want to see me.”
“I know nothing of the sort,” said Peter. “They want to see you very much. They want to see us as a family and know we are happy.”
“Ah,” said June, “right,” and she ashed out the window and pulled the pink silk shell beneath her power suit—which she had worn today out of habit, Elsbeth guessed, since she wouldn’t be showing any houses—away from her breastbone. “You mean they want to see a good return on their investment.” she said.
“June,” said Peter. “You know that is not fair.”
“I know nothing of the sort,” June said, mimicking Peter’s slightly clipped accent—what Elsbeth’s friend Liza called his Oh Captain, My Captain voice. “Your dad’s so Von Trapp,” Liza had observed one night when Liza and Veronica—Very—and Elsbeth were sitting around the kitchen table, watching Peter make them grilled Gruyère and chutney sandwiches. “Except blond, and the geriatric version. Still, I’d do him,” which had made all the girls squeal and Elsbeth shove Liza so hard she fell off her chair.
Peter sighed and shifted to take his handkerchief out of his trousers pocket; he was sweating, which Elsbeth knew he hated. It didn’t help that he never, ever wore short-sleeved shirts because of his tattoo.
“June,” he said, “even if what you are saying were true—which it is not; I know Sol and Ruth can be difficult, but they do care for you, in their fashion, very much. But even if it were true, what would you have me do? We do owe them, you know.”
“Yes,” said June. “I am all too aware, Pete, that what I make doesn’t cover us. I am painfully conscious of Sol’s contributions to our household for taxes and braces and such. But that’s the irony, don’t you see? If I didn’t have to deal with these interruptions, I could pull in enough that we might not need him.”
“I fail to see that one day makes such a difference,” said Peter.
“Wake up, pal,” yelled a driver behind them and lay on his horn. Peter lifted a hand and moved the Volvo forward another half-foot.
“It can make all the difference,” said June. “One property, if it’s the right one, could keep us for a year. And that five-bedroom on Upper Watchung, with the tennis court—its open house is today, and I’m missing it. It makes me sick, Pete. Sick!”
“Will your boss not stand in for you? What’s his name, Hamilton?”
“Harrison. He is, but . . .” June let out a stream of smoke and threw herself back against the seat. “First of all, I don’t want to split the commission.”
“He must be a slave driver if he makes you do all the work and then takes half the commission for one day. Frankly, I think he works you too hard in general.”
June sat up a little straighter. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean you work nights, weekends, at his beck and call seven days a week. He crooks a finger, and you come running. It seems excessive.”
“Look who’s talking,” said June, and then there was a silence in the Volvo, if being surrounded by a thousand other people’s engines and voices and music could be called that. Peter’s dependence on Sol as well as his wife, since Peter could no longer work, was something he despised even more than perspiring.
“Sorry,” said June. “That was uncalled for. I’m just so damned hot. It’s a furnace in here.” She leaned over to turn up the dashboard fan all the way. Heat blasted into the car, flipping Elsbeth’s carefully feathered bangs back from her face.
“Mom,” she said.
“Elsbeth,” said June. She sighed. “Besides, Pete,” she said, “it’s hard to make a name for yourself as a woman in this industry. In any industry. To get half as far as a man, you have to work twice as hard.”
From what Elsbeth could see of her dad’s face in the rearview, he seemed as if he might concede the point—he looked tired, which worried Elsbeth, as the day’s festivities hadn’t even really begun—but then they crept, thank God, into the shadow of the tollbooths, and Peter became preoccupied with digging out correct change. George Washington Bridge, Elsbeth said to herself. GWB. Green, brown, orange. Peter tossed coins into the basket and maneuvered into the traffic on the bridge; June lit another cigarette. Elsbeth blinked up at the mighty girders, then turned to look for the tiny city on her right. NYC, where she had been born: orange, yellow, yellow-orange. She was relieved to be on the bridge at last; it meant the drive was halfway over, even if things generally got worse on the other side.
* * *
Because of the traffic, which didn’t really lighten until they got out of the Bronx, they reached Larchmont a little past two, which meant—by Elsbeth’s estimate—that most of Sol and Ruth’s guests would be well into the cheese, dips, and cocktails part of the program, and the maid, Bertha, would be setting up for lunch. Indeed, the motor court was full, and Peter had to park back by the road, next to one of the shining, canted sheets of rock that protruded through the ground. They got out of the Volvo—ker-chunk, ker-chunk, went the doors, a sound that hit Elsbeth’s stomach with dread; now there was no way out. The next few hours would be a hell of discomfort: Peter blotting his forehead and responding politely to Papa Sol, who would be halfway into a bottle of Cutty Sark and show-off mode; June smiling brightly and escaping as often as she could to check messages on her brand-new mobile phone; Elsbeth trying to avoid her grandparents’ friends, who meant well but, when they couldn’t avoid talking to her, asked questions that were all but unanswerable like “So, how’s school?” or “What do you kids do for fun these days?”
The Rashkins slogged up the driveway, the tar soft underfoot, water running down the rock faces, the air smelling of minerals and humidity. Elsbeth loved the property, which had been an enchanted playground to her when she was little: the shining boulders she could climb on, the waterfall chattering into its secret pool, the flowering shrubs Ruth and the ancient gardener, Yoshi, tended so Sol could photograph them with his special telephoto lens. And the pool. Elsbeth looked longingly at it as she and Peter and June wended through the car maze in the motor court; it gleamed aqua in its grassy setting, beneath the tall oaks. Come in, it whispered, get cool! Elsbeth loved the water; beneath it she was not fat but weightless, agile as a mermaid.
But— “There you are,” called Ruth from the terrace, and “Solly? Sol! They’re here.” There would be no swimming until after lunch. Elsbeth’s parents were already ascending the rock steps, Peter in the lead and June next, her order floating back to Elsbeth: “Pull that collar up, young lady; did you think I wouldn’t notice? And suck in your stomach!” Elsbeth yanked the dress’s neckline even lower, to just above her bra, and, although she knew it was childish, stuck her tongue out at her mother’s bony back.
Then, “Hello! Hello!” the Rashkins cried, younger and older generations, embracing and kissing each other on the cheeks. Sol had abandoned his guests temporarily to greet them; he stood by Ruth’s side, highball glass clinking with ice. Every time Elsbeth saw her grandparents, they seemed to have shrunk a little: Sol melting ever more downward, as though he were made of wax, and Ruth drying out, like a tiny mummy. Sol was oxblood-colored to Elsbeth, although maybe that was just because that was his skin tone in summer, when he fished and golfed as well as drank. Nana Ruth was a soft, dusty beige. “Bubbeleh,” she cried, crushing Elsbeth’s head to her little birdy chest, her arms shaking with effort. She smelled of mothballs, Shalimar, and Pepsodent. “My shayne madele. Let me look at you,” she said, as if it had been years since Elsbeth had last seen her instead of only a few weeks. She smoothed Elsbeth’s bangs off her forehead, the better to see Elsbeth’s whole face.
“Nannnaaaaa,” said Elsbeth, ducking away, “don’t, please,” but then she had to deal with Sol, who pinched her chin in one hand and covered her cheeks with kisses that smelled of whitefish dip and Scotch.
“What a girl,” he boomed, as if the terrace were packed with an invisible audience of dozens; “what a beautiful girl, isn’t she beautiful?” and to Elsbeth’s embarrassment he started to cry. Every time Papa Sol saw her, this happened, and Elsbeth was never sure what she had done to cause it or if there were anything she could do to prevent it.
“She looks more like Rivka every day,” Sol said to Peter, who nodded. Sol always said this too; he meant Elsbeth’s real grandmother, Peter’s mother, who had died of pneumonia before the Nazis could kill her. Elsbeth had seen a photo of her only once, a lady who looked both dumpy and regal, with her stocky build and crown of braids. Of course Elsbeth would look like her, instead of like her own mother, or even her beautiful little half sisters—the twins, Vivian and Ginger, named after movie stars.
“Don’t just stand there, you people, you’re letting all the air out,” said Sol, switching abruptly from sentimental mode. He turned and stumped into the kitchen, Peter following. Elsbeth and Ruth and June stayed on the terrace, June lighting a cigarette.
“Around the child?” said Ruth to June, waving at the smoke. She smiled at Elsbeth. “Look at you, so big—every time I see you, you grow another foot. What are you eating?”
It was a rhetorical question, but June said, “I’m trying to get her to stick to fruit and vegetables, but I know she sneaks junk,” and Elsbeth said, “I do not,” and Ruth said, “Sha, she’s a growing girl, it’s good to have a little extra padding, you never know what could happen,” and June said, “Maybe in wartime Europe that was true, but we know better now, Ruth; it’s not healthy to carry too much weight,” and Ruth said, “She’s just big-boned, aren’t you, darling. How much do you weigh now?” she asked, and Elsbeth said, “Nanaaaaa,” and June said, “About ten pounds more than she should,” and Elsbeth muttered, “Screw you,” and June said, “What was that?” and her mobile phone rang. She took it out of her purse and pulled up the antenna; it was big and black, the size of a brick. “I’ve got to grab this, excuse me,” she said and clicked away down the steps on her high heels. “June Rashkin,” she said.
“What is that contraption?” said Ruth.
“That’s her mobile phone,” Elsbeth explained. “Her boss gave it to her.” And indeed Elsbeth was pretty sure that was who June was talking to, Harrison, a man Elsbeth did not trust in the slightest. Harrison used her name all the time when he spoke to her, the way a soap opera actor or car salesman would: “How are you today, Elsbeth? You look wonderful today, Elsbeth! Elsbeth, isn’t your mom the greatest?” When he smiled, he seemed to have at least three rows of teeth, like a shark.
“Oy,” said Ruth, as she and Elsbeth watched June pace among the cars in the motor court, phone pressed to her ear, looking like Realtor Barbie from this height. Ruth tsked and turned to Elsbeth. “You must be starving after that long trip,” she said, as if Elsbeth and her parents had dragged themselves across the Russian steppes instead of driving from New Jersey. “Would you like a snack before lunch? I got the caviar spread you like, from Zabar’s. And how about a nice cold drink? Iced tea?”
“I’m fine, Nana,” said Elsbeth. “You go ahead, I’ll be in in a minute. I forgot something in the car.”
“It can’t wait?” Elsbeth vehemently shook her head. “All right, darling, don’t be long,” Ruth said, and went into the house. Elsbeth heaved a sigh of relief. There was nothing in the Volvo she needed; she had just wanted another minute to herself, or as many as possible, before she had to go in. For this moment, it was just as she liked it: she was alone on the terrace except for her mother far below and the cicadas like maracas in the trees.
* * *
But—there was somebody else outside after all, Elsbeth discovered to her dismay, somebody who might have witnessed the whole humiliating arrival scene. There was a crashing in the bushes on the far side of the terrace, near the bonsai grove, and from them a man emerged, zipping his pants. Unaware of Elsbeth’s presence, he yanked up the fly of his white jeans and, from the breast pocket of the Cuban shirt he wore, which was misbuttoned so one half of the bottom hung lower than the other, he slid a pack of cigarettes. Elsbeth felt instant sympathy for him. She too often left the house with her blouse fastened the wrong way, or socks that were different colors, or once, most embarrassingly, her skirt tucked into the back of her underpants. The man gazed around as he shook out the match he’d lit his cigarette with, and he looked startled when he saw her.
Then: “Heeeeeey,” he said, as if he and Elsbeth were old friends, “how’s it going?” and he held out his cigarette pack toward her. He smiled and shook it a little as if enticing a squirrel with nuts: Come on, come and get it. He had a friendly, very tan face, brown eyes, and wavy dark hair, his open collar showing a patch of fur on his chest. Like Peter Brady, Elsbeth imagined telling her friends later, if Peter Brady were older, maybe twenty-five. And although Elsbeth had always thought Greg was the cutest Brady brother, she revised this opinion instantly.
“No, thanks, I don’t smoke,” said Elsbeth. She sucked in her stomach and flipped her hair back behind her shoulders. “Not because I’m too young, of course. Because it’s bad for you.”
The man shrugged and tossed his cigarette pack to the coffee table. “You’re right, you’re right,” he said. “But you’ve got to have some bad habits, right? Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do,” and he smiled at Elsbeth. His teeth were very white and straight.
“I guess,” she said. “Were you—um, urinating in the bushes?”
He said somberly, “I might have been watering the plantings, yes.” He winked at her. “Don’t tell anybody, okay, Charlie?”
“Of course not,” she said, and then, “Why did you call me Charlie?”
“Isn’t that the perfume you’re wearing?”
Elsbeth’s cheeks felt suddenly much hotter than was warranted even by the temperature of the day. “How did you know?”
“I’m a connoisseur,” he said, and then, pointing his cigarette at her, “Plus, you look like a Charlie.”
“I do?” Elsbeth said. She was thrilled; she had always hated her name, which Peter and June had chosen out of a phone book in the maternity ward because, they said, they wanted her to be completely her own person. They had closed their eyes and opened the book and put their finger on the Es, and here Elsbeth was, stuck with the name of an old lady, somebody who wore orthopedic shoes; a name that dragged itself along: Elssss–BETH. Elssss–BETH. What her dad called her, Ellie, was not much better, and his childhood pet name for her, Ellie-Belly, was, as it drew attention to the part of her body she loathed most, worst of all.
“My actual name’s Elsbeth,” she said. “But I like Charlie.”
“Elsbeth,” the man repeated, and Elsbeth was impressed: he neither mispronounced it, the way most people did upon first hearing it—Elizabeth? Liz Beth?—nor said how unusual, how interesting. “I think Charlie suits you better,” said the man, “and not because you look like a boy.” He blew out smoke. “Do you mind if I call you Charlie?”
“No,” said Elsbeth, “that’s fine, if you want.” Holding in her breath, she strolled to the railing and gazed out at the view: the lawn and pool and trees and marsh and Long Island Sound, a stripe of glitter in the distance.
“What’s your name?” she asked, as the man came to stand beside her. Which was when Elsbeth realized he was drunk, or at least had been drinking: he smelled of alcohol, although rising from his skin it smelled warm and rich, instead of pickled and rotting, the way Sol smelled when he’d had too much.
“I’m Julian,” said the man. “How do you do?” He held out his hand. Elsbeth shook it. Julian’s palm was dry and smooth despite the heat.
“Are you one of Sol’s artsy-fartsy . . . I mean, one of Sol’s friends?” Elsbeth asked.
Julian laughed, a deep, happy, vital sound that came all the way up from his stomach. “Friend I don’t know about,” he said, “but definitely artsy-fartsy. I’m the taste of the hour, the flavor of the day.”
“Excuse me?” said Elsbeth.
Julian leaned next to Elsbeth on the railing, propping his elbows on it. He was like a toothpaste model; Elsbeth had never been this close to anyone so handsome and yet so normal-looking.
“Sol bought out my first show,” he said. “And he’s still my biggest patron.”
“Oh,” said Elsbeth, “I see.” So this Julian was one of the artists Sol sponsored, a painter or a photographer. She was about to ask which when Julian said, “Excuse me, I’ve got to shake the lily again,” and he walked off the terrace.
“Why don’t you just go inside?” Elsbeth called.
“I don’t want to have to deal with everybody,” said Julian, and then he put his finger to his lips and glided out of sight beyond the bonsais.
Elsbeth certainly understood that. She sat on one of the iron deck chairs to wait for him, its metal hot through the material of June’s dress, and toyed with Julian’s cigarette pack. “Marlboro,” she murmured, “maroon, navy, red, light blue, orange, purple, red, purple—”
“What’re you doing?” Julian said behind her, and Elsbeth jumped and put the pack back.
“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry. It’s just this dumb habit I have—”
“You think letters have colors?” said Julian. Elsbeth nodded, embarrassed. “You’re synesthetic!” he said in great delight.
“I’m what?”
“You’re a synesthete,” he said and sat beside her. “So am I. We have synesthesia. We think letters and numbers have colors.”
“You do too?” Elsbeth said. She had never met anyone else who did this.
“I do,” Julian said. “We’re two of a kind. There aren’t many of us synesthetes, but there are a few. It’s our synapses. Something up here”—and he tapped his temple—“is scrambled, but in what I consider a marvelous way. Our senses are cross-connected, so that tastes have colors, and music and numbers, and abstract concepts—like months and days—have shapes. Tell me, for instance, how do you think of the calendar?”
“It’s round,” Elsbeth said, “like a clock. January’s at the top and June’s at the bottom.”
“Exactly,” Julian said. “And numbers?”
“They march into infinity! In a horizontal line that’s light at the beginning, but the higher up you go, the more it shades into darkness. And the numbers have colors too: five is red, and seven is green.”
“It isn’t, though,” Julian said. “Seven is blue.”
“Seven is not blue,” Elsbeth said indignantly. “Three is blue.”
“Three is so not blue,” said Julian. “It’s beige.”
“It is not!” Elsbeth cried. “Next you’ll be telling me your name doesn’t start with yellow.”
“It doesn’t,” Julian said. “J is red.”
“No way,” said Elsbeth. “Your name is orange-yellow, yellow, navy blue, black, blue-black, mustard yellow.”
“And your name is yellow, forest green, navy, red, neon pink, charcoal.”
“E is not yellow!” said Elsbeth. “It’s blue.”
“Ah, but I didn’t spell Elsbeth. I spelled Charlie. That’s who you are. Charlie the synesthete.”
“Right,” said Elsbeth. She was laughing. “Excellent.”
Julian picked up his sweating glass from the table, sipped from it, and handed it to her. Elsbeth drank gratefully: gin and tonic with lime, hot and flat from the sun.
“Would you like to pose for me, Charlie?” Julian asked.
“What?” Elsbeth said.
“I’d like to shoot you. You’ve got a unique quality, a look. And I’ve never shot a synesthete before.”
“Shoot me?”
Julian let out that deep vital laugh again. “I’m a photographer.”
“Oh, duh,” said Elsbeth. She had forgotten to ask his medium in her excitement at discovering somebody else who did what she could do. “You want to shoot—me?”
“I do,” said Julian. He stood up, took a brown leather wallet out of his back pocket, and handed her a business card.
“Think about it and let me know. You can call me anytime, okay, Charlie?”
“Okay,” said Elsbeth, and Julian smiled at her. Then he turned and went without another word through the sliding door into the solarium.
Elsbeth looked down at the card. It was warm from being in Julian’s pocket, next to his body: julian wilton photography, all in lowercase letters on a white background, and there was a number and an address in New York. That was it. Elsbeth glanced at the house, then held the card to her nose. It smelled of damp paper. She tucked it carefully into her bra.
* * *
Lunch was served in the solarium on the side of the house, Elsbeth’s favorite room because within its glass walls she could pretend she was eating outside. The shelves ringing its circumference now displayed Ruth’s gardening obsession: cacti. There were plants with broad leaves and pink flowers; teardrop-sized pods; sharp four-inch spines or white fuzz that looked deceptively soft until Elsbeth stroked it and came away with tiny splinters embedded in her fingertips. She had learned not to touch anything in here, that whatever a plant’s beauty, it might be painful or dangerous. Some were and some weren’t, and there was no way to know for sure.
Usually Elsbeth tried to be invisible, positioning herself near the coffee table on the orange couch and eating as many hors d’oeuvres as she could before June caught her—Ruth went into the city to specialty-shop for these occasions, and Elsbeth loved the pâté and Brie, the stone-ground crackers, the scallion cream cheese and the caviar dip whose tiny eggs popped in her mouth with delicious flavor. Today, however, she was more interested in Julian; she hovered near the living room doorway, trying to track him among the other guests and wondering where he would sit. This was indeed Sol’s artsy-fartsy crowd, not his regular childhood buddies with their fleshy noses and funny nicknames, pretending to pull quarters from behind Elsbeth’s ears, their soufflé-haired wives whose kisses left thick lipstick on Elsbeth’s cheeks. These people were art critics and collectors, their inquisitive faces vaguely familiar to Elsbeth from the times she met them here and at galleries Sol took them to, from museum openings and newspaper columns. They began filtering in when Ruth clapped her hands and announced lunch was ready, Bach and argumentative conversation accompanying them. Julian was in the rear, talking to a younger man in electric-blue-framed glasses and a Don Johnson white suit; Elsbeth waited, then pounced into the chair opposite from the one Julian chose, elbowing a man out of her way whom she then realized might be the art critic for Newsweek.
“Sorry,” she said to him.
“That’s all right,” he said and gallantly held Elsbeth’s chair out for her.
Julian smiled at Elsbeth as the maid poured a glass of wine over his shoulder. “We meet again, Charlie,” he said and raised his drink to her.
“You’ve met before?” said the Newsweek man, and the woman on the other side said, “Are you surprised?” and there was some laughter that didn’t sound to Elsbeth quite convivial. She smiled at Julian, then noticed that the woman taking a seat next to him and fluffing out her napkin was June. Elsbeth scowled.
“What?” June said, feeling Elsbeth’s glare. She bared her teeth: Lipstick? Elsbeth shrugged. June winked at Elsbeth in a just-us-girls kind of way, but Elsbeth wasn’t buying it. That was the trouble with June: she did have her moments, but she was like the sun coming out from the clouds on an overcast day; just when you were enjoying the warmth, she disappeared again, leaving you longing for what you didn’t know you’d been missing and even colder than you’d been before.
Ruth tinged her fork on her water glass and said, “L’chaim,” and up and down the table everyone lifted their glasses and toasted. Conversation hummed again as the guests passed platters, handed along baskets of challah and trays of cold cuts, pinched up lettuce in silver tongs. Elsbeth grabbed whatever came her way, watching Julian from the corners of her eyes. He piled his plate with cucumber salad, salmon, bluefish, and remoulade.
“Oh, Elsbeth,” June said. “So much roast beef? And two rolls?” She herself had taken nothing but a cup of gazpacho, sans the sour cream that went with it. She pushed it toward Elsbeth. “Here, I don’t need all of this.”
“I’m fine,” said Elsbeth.
“Come on,” said June, “we girls have to watch our figures, right?”
“June, doll,” said Ruth, “you want she should starve?” and Elsbeth, desperate to stop this conversation before Julian noticed—he was talking to the man on his other side—said, more loudly than she’d intended, “I know how to feed myself, Mother.”
“Hey,” said Sol, irritated, “pipe down. We’re trying to have a discussion here.”
“Sorry,” sang June. She picked up her wine. “I give up. Eat whatever you want,” and she turned, to Elsbeth’s horror, to Julian, who had now started in on his lunch.
“Teenagers,” she said, “such an impossible age, am I right?”
The Newsweek critic scoffed, and the lady beside him murmured, “Ask the expert.”
Julian glanced up and raised his dark eyebrows, then ate a forkful of salad.
“You have children too, Mr. Wilton?” June asked, and now Elsbeth heard, very definitely, a snort. It came from the man between her dad and Sol; he was laughing.
“Pardon,” he said, “I couldn’t help overhearing. Really, it’s just too delicious.”
Julian buttered a piece of challah. “I don’t have children, Mrs. Rashkin,” he said.
“But he is the Pied Piper of the art world,” said the Newsweek critic.
“More like Humbert Humbert,” said the lady next to him, and there was more of that sharp laughter.
“Oh!” said June. “Now I know why your name sounds familiar; I read about you in the New Yorker. You’re that photographer . . .”
“Yes,” said Julian, “I’m the one who shoots children. I do love them. That’s why they’re my subject. Their unself-consciousness, their purity and joie de vivre—”
Suddenly the Humbert Humbert woman crashed her fork down on her plate. “I don’t know how you can live with yourself,” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Julian said mildly.
The woman stood, her chair legs producing a violent scrape on the tiles. She was about June’s age, with painfully short hair and what looked like a miniature cuckoo clock pinned at the throat of her black shirt. Her mouth shook.
“Art should never be used to justify immorality,” she said. “There’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed, and you have crossed it.”
“That’s enough,” boomed Sol. “Mr. Wilton is our guest of honor.”
“Mr. Wilton is a pornographer,” the woman said.
“Oh, I think that’s a bit reductive,” said the waxed-mustache man, and the Newsweek critic muttered, “Plebian morality.”
Julian looked calmly at the woman, though Elsbeth noticed his fingers pinching and pinching the seam of his jeans under the glass-topped table. “I create images,” he said. “I’m interested in the play of light and shade on the human form, as artists have been for millennia. Would you level the same accusations at Michelangelo? At Renoir? Impurity’s in the eye of the beholder, and I think it says more about your mind-set than—”
“They’re children,” shouted the woman.
Now the whole table quivered with quiet, even Sol. Then Peter cleared his throat.
“Perhaps Ellie should go for a swim,” he said, and to Elsbeth’s tremendous mortification every head in the room swiveled toward her.
“That’s a wonderful idea,” said Ruth. “Go on, Bubbie.”
“But I’m fine here,” Elsbeth said.
“Elsbeth,” said Peter, “go,” and at her dad’s rare use of her full name, Elsbeth laid her napkin on her plate. She got up and, feeling as though she were in the dream in which she’d come to school naked, walked stiffly from the room. She didn’t dare look at Julian. She was followed by the lady in the black shirt, who brushed past Elsbeth in the living room and stormed through the swinging door into the kitchen. A minute later, over the limp of restarted conversation in the solarium, Elsbeth heard the growling engine of Julian’s accuser’s car as she started it and drove away.
* * *
Elsbeth waited to see if anyone else would come out of the solarium—her dad, maybe, to make sure she was all right, or Julian!—but when nobody did, she wandered into the living room. When she’d been younger, she would have seized this chance to search for the photo: the forbidden, the fascinating, the secret picture of her dad’s first family that Ruth used to keep in her powder room. Elsbeth knew rationally that the photo had disappeared the day her mom had caught Ruth showing it to her and telling her again the terrible story of Masha and the twins, but for years she had kept searching for it anyway, hoping she would turn over Ruth’s silver-backed hairbrushes or panty hose and there they would be, her unfamiliar young dad and his first wife and Elsbeth’s half sisters. They had the same glamour as the scrapbook Ruth kept of Peter and June’s courtship: menus from Peter’s famous restaurant, Masha’s; magazine covers, Harper’s and Vogue, with June’s face on them; gossip columns showing June and Peter dancing at the Rainbow Room or a place called ElMo. They were all memories Elsbeth coveted; they belonged to her, even if they had happened before she was born, and she’d spent so much time trying to occupy them that she felt as if she had actually lived them. How many hours had she spent poring over the photos of Masha’s, the restaurant almost like another person: its red walls, the laughing patrons with hats and furs and cocktails, the giant chandelier? How many times had Elsbeth pictured herself in clogs and chef’s jacket, whisking up recipes in its kitchen? Her imaginings of her dad’s life before the war, the real Masha, her twin sisters—they had been like that too, except sadder.
But Elsbeth had long moved beyond the need to look for the photo; she was mature now and accepted that it was gone. She was easing back toward the solarium to eavesdrop when she saw the book, lying on the coffee table amid a crumple of napkins, glasses half full of liquid and the pulp of desiccated fruit. luminous beings: images by julian wilton was printed on the glossy cover, beneath a photo so intensely colored that it reminded Elsbeth of the time of day just before sunset, when the vibrant light made her feel melancholy for no reason. The image showed a girl about twelve or thirteen, with long, light hair, a chest flat as a boy’s except for pushpin nipples that pointed at the viewer, and a challenging stare. She was straddling the fork of a tree—and she was naked.
Elsbeth appropriated the book, swiping it from the coffee table along with a half-eaten tray of cheese and crackers and carrying it all to a wing chair, which she turned to face the bay windows—from behind, if she pulled her legs up, nobody would know she was in it. She arranged herself so the book was on one knee and the food on the other and leafed and ate, leafed and ate, careful to hold the pages by their edges. They all featured the girl on the cover and another who was probably her sister: a second blonde with light eyes who stared almost angrily at the camera. They swam in ponds and lay on riverbanks; they ate tomatoes in fields, the juice running down their bare arms; they sunbathed on a city rooftop deck, the faces of office workers visible in tiny windows across the street. In all of the photos they were naked. It was all on display.
When Elsbeth got to the last image, the cover model sitting alone on a boulder, she closed the book. Who were these girls, who displayed their nudity with such unself-consciousness, such lack of shame? It was totally alien to Elsbeth, who in every locker room and at each slumber party hunched in corners to hide her cone-shaped breasts, the rolls of fat at her stomach. She had been different for as long as she could remember: a matryoshka doll among puppets. In first grade she’d been called Elsbeth the Elephant, in fifth the Doughnut after she’d been caught eating a box of them. In the lunchroom one day, while Elsbeth was blissfully unwrapping her Laughing Cow cheese cubes, Christy Albertson, thin and popular with two long braids, had wrinkled her nose and said, “Are those butter?” Snickers, and everyone moved away. At camp, Elsbeth’s peers weighed 45 pounds, 48, 50; when Elsbeth stepped on the scale, clumsy with shame and dread, the nurse announced, “Ninety-six-point-three pounds!” Now, as a sophomore, Elsbeth was five foot three and 145 pounds; she had been surpassed in height by some girls and in cup size by others, and she could hide among the tall and the busty. But she still knew that every bite she took would congeal in lumps on her body; she would never be like the others, who ate candy bars, ice cream sandwiches, and Fritos because they were hungry, because they wanted them, without a second thought. And Elsbeth was even more bitterly envious of Julian’s models, showing everything with careless confidence. Everything—in front of Julian!
Chairs scraped back in the solarium, and Elsbeth implemented a hasty strategy. She raced through the kitchen, grabbing a Pepperidge Farm cookie from the tray on the table—“Did you get enough to eat, miss?” the maid called, and Elsbeth said, “Yes, thanks!” as she escaped down the basement stairs. She had to shout it; Bertha, the new maid Ruth had found after Maria retired, was a little deaf, a kindly, grandmother-age woman with Brillo hair and missing teeth. “She’s far too old for any real work,” Ruth had whispered to Elsbeth one day, “but she went through the Shoah like your father, so I took her on as a mitzvah.” Apparently the Nazis had damaged Bertha’s hearing, though whether by bomb blast or torture with a hot poker or something, Elsbeth didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine anyone doing that to Bertha, let alone Bertha having the kind of secret anyone would want that badly.
The basement was dim and cool, the linoleum squares kind on Elsbeth’s bare feet. She navigated the warren of rooms: Sol’s wet bar, with the six-foot stuffed marlin over it; Sol’s projector room, where he made them watch slideshows; Sol’s framed prints of boats, flowers, peasants in Italy, the onion-dome churches of Leningrad. Sol had won a couple of minor prizes in amateur competitions before realizing that he would never be a professional photographer and sponsoring them instead. But he still used his darkroom, which was down here too, and Elsbeth gave it a curious glance as she passed. She would have liked to peek in, to educate herself a little more about Julian’s world, but she had once opened the door while Sol was developing photos and ruined a batch of film, so she had avoided it ever since. Instead she went to the closet off the laundry room, called the changing room because here Ruth kept the family’s swimsuits and rainbow-striped towels for swimming, and pulled off June’s dress.
Elsbeth faced herself in the mirror with the usual loathing. Her soft breasts, her blubbery belly—as much as she hated the term, Elsbeth understood why June called it a double stomach. She pinched it viciously, her fingers digging into the flesh and leaving pink marks, then turned to the toilet in the corner. She had never tried this before—something her friend Liza had told her about. “It’s only for when I’ve really pigged out,” Liza had said, “like gone absolument fou at Carvel and scarfed a whole cookie cake. Which actually is not bad because ice cream is a cinch to throw up.” Elsbeth bent. She slid two fingers down her throat and waited. Her stomach hitched, once, twice, but nothing else happened.
“Come on,” she mumbled. She pushed her fingers down farther and forced herself to think of how many slices of cheese and sleeves of crackers had been on that tray, and the Mint Milano cookie she’d snatched from the kitchen just out of habit and apparently eaten without even thinking about it, and that morning’s food: the breakfast Peter had made, an omelet with Boursin and sautéed mushrooms; croissants fresh from the oven and his homemade raspberry jam and about a stick of butter—Elsbeth loved butter. She crammed her whole hand in her mouth, gagging, and then she remembered something else Liza had said: “If you’re having trouble, just tickle that little hangy-downy thing at the back of your throat. That’ll make everything come up.”
And it did. The cheese and cracker ball emerged in a satisfying gush, some half digested. Elsbeth did it again and again until she was retching only thick, clear fluid, and then she stood, flushed, and washed her hands and face. Her eyes were bloodshot and her ears were ringing, but she felt as if she were floating. She was serene, empty, and calm. She stripped off her underwear and reached for her Jantzen one-piece, hanging on the back of the door, and Julian’s card—julian wilton photography—damp and curved, fell out of her right bra cup.
Elsbeth retrieved the card and hid it in her clothes, which she tucked onto a shelf, behind extra towels. Then she pulled on her suit—was it her imagination, or did it squeak up a little more easily over her bulges already?—and went out through the garage to the motor court. The afternoon was bright and humid, the sun white in a steamy sky. Elsbeth walked at a queenly pace across the melting tar, between the heat-shimmering cars. The air whirred with cicadas. The pool shone among the tall oaks. Elsbeth could see, from the very corner of her left eye, that Julian was on the terrace again, smoking while a man in a maroon suit talked animatedly to him. Elsbeth didn’t look back, but she could hear Julian’s voice in return, smell his cigarette. She proceeded toward the pool, holding her breath and swinging her hips just a bit from side to side. She knew he was watching.