The Widow Waltz Read online

  When we arrive, Opal takes my coat. I give her a hug and head straight to my bedroom and into my dressing room.

  “Ben,” I say to his photograph. “Explain yourself, please. How could you do this to me? What were you thinking?”

  The man I love has left me naked and exposed. My first impulse it to hurl his picture across the room. My second is to hope for an explanation, a flotation device I can hold on to because I don’t want to hate him, this boy who became my husband, this man I have loved for more than half my life.

  I bury Ben’s picture under a mound of his sweaters, out of sight.

  3.

  Nicola Silver-Waltz never knew when Luey would be as soft and yielding as a freshly baked sugar cookie or when she’d bubble into a blistering pot of crazy. “Put on a bra!” Nicola had shouted this morning at the closed door of Luey’s bedroom. “If you own one. The lawyer doesn’t need to size up your nipples.”

  Luey had been blasting Super Freak. When this song had been hot, they were little girls in leotards doing crooked arabesques at ballet recitals or shaking their small, saucy booties for their parents, who thought everything they did or said was adorable. Their mother had gotten over this fiction, though they used to be able to count on their dad. If they’d shared their thoughts—which Nicola and Luey had done little of for the last decade—they’d both admit that they expected Ben Silver to sail through the door and swoop to spin them around in his long, strong arms. How could he be . . . Neither sister could get to deceased, let alone dead.

  Luey had ultimately worn her most reactionary garment, a brown jersey skirt, knee-length but clingy. Still, Luey barked at Nicola as if she had admonished her choice. “We don’t all have trust funds and get to shop in Europe,” Luey said, as if that had anything to do with her clothing selection.

  When Nicola turned twenty-one two years ago, she had achieved financial emancipation through no effort of her own. Luey continued on the parental dole and was often groveling for extra cash. She regretted that she and Nicola weren’t tightly braided, like some sisters.

  Nicola had a nauseating feeling that Daddy was as tapped out as the lawyer claimed. She would have dismissed the story he told them about their dad’s money, had the lawyer not been so gaga over her mom. It was apparent to Nicola, who trusted her intuition on such matters, that Walter Fleigelman was smitten with Georgia Waltz. During the meeting, each time her mother glanced at the artwork assaulting the walls—garish paintings that Nicola guessed had been selected all at once by an interior decorator—the man feasted his beetle eyes on Mother as if she were a candy bar. Nicola had stopped telling her mom that men were always doing a looky-loo, because Georgia never noticed. If only she had half the appeal her mother had.

  Not that Nicola lacked for admirers. Men of all kinds, she had discovered in high school, were drawn to Asian women, even if that woman had visited her native land only once on a teen tour. Just last month in Paris, she was juggling the attention of an understudy acrobat with Cirque du Soleil and, in the top position, a sous-chef who may or may not still be married whom she’d met in culinary school. He had helped her get a temporary job as a prep cook, coming in early to cut vegetables, break down meats, and fillet fish—culinary grunt work. Neither man was on this side of the Atlantic or, Nicola was certain, the One. She’d been holding out for a love like that of her parents, who were as drawn to each other as a bee to a rose, though she softly regretted that since she’d returned to the United States for her father’s funeral, she’d yet to hear from the chef, Emile. Not an email, not a text. She blinked away the image of him pulling her into one of the restaurant’s walk-in freezers, the act’s heat heightened by the possibility of discovery.

  When they came home after a silent ride, she, their mother, and Luey each decamped to their respective bedroom and collapsed. Nicola sobbed. She thought first about how her father was her mother’s center of gravity, an indubitable fact, and that to lose him young and suddenly—this wasn’t fair. Then, like a swiftly moving weather system, her mind shifted squarely to herself, especially to how she’d gotten to love Paris and the small furnished flat she’d let not far from the Picasso Museum on the Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine. The city felt like one giant block party, as if the spirits of the world’s creative elite haunted the cobblestone streets and she belonged next to them, soaking up inspiration, stopping for a coffee at random cafés in the city’s misty mornings; reading in parks during the afternoon; drinking wine in the amethyst twilight. Paris might be her answer. But would she ever be able to make another deposit to the account she’d opened at Crédit Lyonnais—or even return? She chided herself for thinking this, but there it was.

  4.

  “Sadie,” is all I have to say, holding up her leash. My goddess, whose coat I ask my hairdresser to match, trots toward me on sturdy corgi legs. I believe she is grinning.

  For Sadie, Ben’s death has turned into Mardi Gras. I have lifted the ban on night-long cuddling, her warm back bookending mine where his used to be. Sadie’s monogrammed bed waits on the carpeted floor, but I may as well dump that sucker—there’s no going back for either of us. The bigger bonus is that for the last three days I’ve walked her every four hours. Who needs a personal trainer when you have heartbreak? Some days we find ourselves heading south, once as far as the Village, another time east toward Chinatown, whose layers of pungent odors drive Sadie mad, and on to what remains of Little Italy and over to the East Village. This is where the half of Nicola’s friends who don’t live in Brooklyn’s Park Slope or Williamsburg have settled, a neighborhood that even ten years ago was known mostly for its drug dealers, or so I, in my cloister, believed. Currently, one-bedrooms cost more than those uptown by Gracie Mansion, where Ben and I began our life together in a white brick box devoid of architectural integrity but armed with doormen, on which my mother insisted.

  “Going out again, Georgia?” Opal says. We long ago dropped formalities, though Opal never felt at ease addressing Ben with anything less than “Mr. S.”

  “I need some air.” From the concern on Opal’s dusky Modigliani face, I know I’m not fooling her. “It’s the only time I can think,” I offer, inching toward the truth.

  For the last two days, with Opal’s help, I’ve been ripping apart my home. I’ve claimed that we’re looking for insurance records, though I’m sure my poorly disguised anguish suggests a greater apocalypse. Together we’ve burrowed into at least half of the closets, drawers, and cupboards. As my life has turned out to be a sanctum of secrets, there are ample opportunities for concealment within my rambling apartment: I’m convinced that I’ll find if not a pot of gold, at least a clue to the Sudoku that has become my MIA inheritance. I refuse to let myself slow for a cry or accept my daughters’ help. I can breathe only if I steer clear of Nicola and Luey’s beseeching looks and reasonable paranoia. But a few hours of ransacking at a time are all I’m able to bear. It is Sadie who benefits when I need a break.

  “Come on, girl.” I snap her red wool coat under her belly. As she wags her stubby tail, I grab Ben’s old trench, tighten the belt, and slip into Luey’s rain boots. Sadie is better dressed than I am. I hold the leash in one hand and a golf umbrella in the other and we’re off.

  Sadie tugs when we pass the doughnut shop on Sixth Avenue. “Forget it,” I say. Today we’re traveling south, as I replay the moment when Wally ripped the scab off the truth. He looked at me as if I were Joannie, our beloved cocker who preceded Sadie. Joannie had received a steroid injection the day before her death, which allowed her to prance to the gallows on her own four paws. She gave the vet a sloppy kiss, never suspecting she was going to be put down. I lit out of the room. Ben handled it.

  I refuse to be Joannie. No one is going to wind a pink bandage around my flank, stab me with a hypodermic needle, and kick me out of the game. I’m going to find the money. Ben couldn’t pass a homeless person without dipping into his pockets. He was alwa
ys big-hearted and princely, never parsimonious. The husband I know and love would not be capable of leaving me almost stone-broke.

  It came to me in a dream that he cashed in every investment and packed away neatly bundled bills, somewhere. So far the results of my dig have yielded only the ragged ephemera of four sloppy lives: given-up-for-dead sunglasses, crumpled receipts for restaurants that have gone AWOL and keys to doors that have vanished from memory.

  “Georgia?” someone says as I plod along, eyes down. The face I see lacks a name my brain is willing to cough up. “Franny Wilson?” the woman says. “From the Met.”

  I must be staring dumbly because she adds, “Nicola and Lisa were together in grade school.”

  “Of course.” I remember to say, “Congratulations on Lisa and Todd.” Not long ago the Times ran Lisa Wilson’s wedding photo, her face as round as a pizza, her fiancé a boy who went to camp with Nicola. I sent the clip off to her in Paris.

  “They’ve been programmed like robots,” Nicola scoffed in a later conversation, reciting the names of the investment banking firms where the bride and groom worked. I resisted pointing out that at least the two had graduated from college in the standard four years and completed their MBAs. It did not take them five years and three academic institutions to get their bachelor’s degree, after which they moved three times to three continents with little more to show for it beyond culinary skills, Japanese knives to execute every recipe, and an enviable wardrobe. Nicola may be my even-keeled daughter, but no one can accuse her of following a straight path toward success. At least she can mince a Bermuda onion faster than I can brush my teeth.

  Franny grasps my hand. “I read about your husband’s passing. I’m so sorry. The way Ben always ran the auction—he was such a terrific father, such a great guy.”

  I’ll be the judge of that, I think, but answer, “You’re very kind,” eager to escape her stilted pity.

  “Will I be seeing you back at the Met soon, I hope?”

  I know my life must be reinvented. That I have to go forward. But I can’t picture myself leading groups of high school students through the American wing, then catching up on gossip with other docents while we pick at salads in the cafeteria. Since Ben’s death, however, I have discovered that when I meet people, if I say almost nothing, they cut the compassion and move on, which is what this woman does, with, “Well, bye—please call me if there’s anything I can ever do.”

  Within a few steps, Franny Wilson’s offer is forgotten. I keep going, and an hour later Sadie and I are in the Meatpacking District. It used to be that on those rare occasions when Ben and I walked along this dark armpit of a street, I worried we’d be robbed by a transvestite hooker. Now, I force myself not to gawk at the windows of stores and restaurants that I most likely can no longer afford. I am near Daniel’s gallery and look for my watch, which I have forgotten to wear. Then I consider, does it matter what time it is, since I’ve cancelled every lunch, meeting, and appointment for this week and the next? The drizzle has stopped and Daniel won’t mind callers, even if one reeks of wet dog.

  Twentieth off Tenth is on the southern fringe of the Chelsea art scene. Sadie and I move to the middle of this gritty industrial stretch to avoid two yacht-sized trucks unloading their rarefied cargo in delivery bays. We arrive at 529, which is respectable if drab, and greet the concierge before we take the elevator to the sixth floor. A layer of anxiety melts as soon as I see the thin black logo quietly proclaiming: DANIEL RUSSIANOFF GALLERY. I breathe deeply before I push open the glass door and enter the modest space with its requisite sludge-brown concrete floor, alabaster walls, soaring ceilings, and track lighting. There are grander galleries on ground floors a few blocks away, but this one belongs to Daniel, my closest friend.

  Half the walls are empty. Daniel’s recent show, a copse of muted Zhivago-esque landscapes, ended last week. I had coveted a triptych of lonely birches on backgrounds that faded from a dawn gray to the faintest violet, but I couldn’t persuade Ben to buy the piece. Now I’m grateful, because had Ben indulged me, I would see these works as Nicola, Luey, and me, swaying in the breeze, ready to topple. I stare at the space where the paintings hung.

  “She who snoozes, loses,” says Daniel, black-haired with a closely trimmed beard and mustache. He has broad shoulders and stands only a few inches taller than I do, his bulk rendered elegant by the fine tailoring of his tweed jacket woven in the grays of cobblestones. Dark curls I have to resist touching tumble over his forehead and collar. His nose is a beautiful, bumpy beak.

  “Did they at least go to a good home?” I ask Daniel as he plants kisses on both my cheeks. He smells of the woods and a spice that recalls Thanksgiving, a holiday that last Thursday I celebrated with my imploded family over margaritas and take-out enchiladas.

  “I’m guessing it’s an anniversary present for the Mrs. or the first acquisition of newlyweds,” he says, down on his knee, rubbing Sadie’s back. She turns over and exposes her stomach for equal treatment. “I restrained myself from sinking the deal with too many questions. You’d have been proud.”

  “Good boy,” I say.

  Daniel is as loquacious as his partner, my brother, is not, and he gives new meaning to the term better half. It’s worth putting up with Stephan’s superiority to enjoy the gift of Daniel, nine years my brother’s junior. Around Stephan, I see myself as a bore simply for having been born heterosexual. Next to him, I feel ungainly, although I am pleased that I’m not like many of my friends, overly proud of ropy, hard-won bodies mismatched to faces that may as well display logos advertising cosmetic surgeons and dermatologists. Daniel, however, never makes me feel like a fool. Rather, in his company I see myself as attractive, lively, and, most important, almost woozy with happiness. His energy is a helium that inflates every depleted cell.

  Daniel not only visits my mother more often than Stephan does, but through one degree of separation to him, my life has been blessed. There’s Kieran Shanahan, the designer of our apartment; Howard Hansen, an art consultant; Andreas Kimmel, a florist of impeccable talent; and Jimmy Lopez, a personal shopper who has refused to allow me to look as “dowdy as the rich bitch you are.” Since Stephan is a jeweler, Daniel likes to point out that with my team of dedicated professionals, augmented by a skilled hair colorist—Josie, Jimmy’s twin—I require no taste of my own and need a hetero male in my life strictly for bill-paying and sex.

  “Let’s go in the back and have a coffee. I’ve made a fresh pot.”

  “I’m way over my caffeine limit,” I say, “but I can never turn you down.” To my ears, my laugh sounds as shrill as Sadie’s bark when someone stomps on her paw.

  “You don’t say no because whatever I offer is always sublime. Like today. Biscotti with dried cranberries and hazelnuts. I’ll make you eat two—you look too thin.”

  As I said, an angel.

  We sit in the tiny office, Daniel at his desk, Sadie under it, and me in a leather folding chair the color of good scotch. From a small refrigerator he raises a glass bottle of organic whole milk as if it’s a scepter. “Sorry. No one percent. If I’d known you were coming . . .” He finds white porcelain cups and saucers. Daniel considers mugs plebian, one of the few ways in which he’s adopted Stephan’s affectations.

  Before I lose my nerve, I hit him with the question I’ve never dared to ask. “Why didn’t Stephan like Ben?”

  Daniel doesn’t respond. He may be protective of me, but he has my brother’s back.

  “Why, exactly?” I repeat. “I’m going somewhere with this.”

  He leans away as far as he can, which isn’t far. “I heard you.”

  “Did he think Ben wasn’t as smart as he is,” I offer, “because I wouldn’t want to live on the difference between those IQs?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, George.” From anyone other than Ben or Daniel, I hate this nickname.

  “Was he jealous of Ben’s success?�
� Big Brother once called my life “one endless soft-focus French toast brunch,” though he has plenty of his own high-thread-count details to envy—a fussed-over Brooklyn Heights brownstone; Liberty Farm, which isn’t a farm but a two-hundred-year-old stone house in Pennsylvania with a greenhouse and an empty horse barn; and a willow green 1972 Jaguar that he protects from inclement weather as if it were the queen of England. “I’ve always sensed that in the Ben department, Stephan felt loathing and contempt.”

  I see that Daniel is debating whether to say anything.

  “Some sort of a trust thing,” he offers.

  “What do you mean?” I pretend to be offended that the reputation of the husband who has left me high and dry has been impugned. It throws everything off to think that my brother is perceptive.

  “Stephan sometimes thought Ben was full of . . .” Daniel is too polite to damn the dead. “Bluster.”

  “I’m mystified.”

  My tone is coy and loaded, yet Daniel is gentle. “Stephan worried about you,” he says. “Worries about you.”

  “And he shows this how, by telling me I’m spoiling Nicola or riding roughshod on Luey or simply avoiding my calls and invitations?”

  “Oh, come on,” Daniel says, affectionately. “Cut the indignity.”

  “Even if it’s earned?”

  “Especially if it’s true.”

  It’s an open secret that to our mother, Stephan is Gregory Peck meets Hugh Jackman, her final pre-Alzheimer crush on the tall, dark, and handsome continuum. Since Stephan developed a thing for scarves, she has referred to him as “debonair,” her highest praise for a man. Now Daniel and I are both chuckling, until I find myself starting to unspool. “Will you please tell my brother ‘Point, Stephan,’” I say. “He did have absolutely every reason to think Ben was a . . .” I fish for a word. “A liar.” Only when I say it do I hear how derisive it sounds.