Saturn's Return to New York Read online

  It’s all I have left of my father And I’m not giving up three grand of it to Save The Tooth.

  Chapter 9

  Veronica’s life is film She rarely dates, she has few friends (and most of those are in the business), and her first response to any action is to film it. Veronica’s known what she wanted to do since the summer between our junior and senior years at St. Elizabeth’s when we took a filmmaking class together at an NYU extension program. I made a three-minute Super 8 short of my boyfriend’s dog romping through Central Park, which I thought was quite clever. Veronica made an epic twenty-minute documentary about her doorman and his snow globe collection, which was enthusiastically received by the summer-school faculty, and that was it. The fact that the doorman film has been her greatest success to date, m terms of public opinion, hasn’t stopped her for a second. Veronica has complete faith in her talents, even if no one else does.

  Sometimes I think Veronica films life to the exclusion of living it, maybe intentionally, and so I’m not surprised when she asks if she can film Evelyn as she loses her mind, make a documentary showing the great woman’s decline Somehow, during junior-high sleepovers and occasional GV parties, Veronica developed a huge swoony crush on my mother. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone else’s mother was so negligent that they could be jealous of my slim relationship with Evelyn, but Veronica’s parents didn’t even live in New York. Her father traveled around Asia, lawyering for a big oil company, and her mother was head researcher for a Republican think tank in Washington, D C, whatever that means. Rather than send her to boarding school, they left her alone with a nanny in an apartment on West Tenth Street And when they were around, they picked her hair, her clothes, her school reports, nothing was ever quite right. At least Evelyn is glamorous, with her literary connections and New York Times interviews, and either too detached or too kind to spend her energy criticizing me Even when I dropped out of college, the beginning and the end of her criticism was a heated discussion over dinner at Antonio’s.

  Veronica’s upset about my mother, and so she wants to film her. I tell her no to the film. I know Veronica wants to do something for Evelyn, but this is too morbid. I won’t ask her So Veronica asks, how about some stills? Portraits. I tell her we’ll see

  To my surprise, Evelyn loves the idea, and so the three of us spend a sunny afternoon together in a studio on Crosby Street, rented by the hour. Veronica has the requisite New York Photographer Look to a T: black Louise Brooks bob, black pants, black turtleneck top She’s intently futzing around with an arsenal of cameras, from an automatic 35mm to a 4X5 portrait camera When she’s finally ready she doesn’t use any backdrop or artificial light, she just plops my mother down in a big wicker chair by a window and starts shooting away.

  Evelyn is laughing like a schoolgirl. “You know, I did some modeling in college, my first few years at Columbia. I told you girls about that a million times ”

  A million times? No, never This is new information. “Mom, you never told me that ”

  “Sure I did,” she says dismissively

  “Sure she did,” says Veronica, shooting as she speaks “I knew that”

  “I don’t think so,” I say

  “Sure I remember,” says Veronica. “Once in high school, when I slept over, you told me about it. You were showing me how to put on makeup ”

  “When did this happen?” Now I’m pissed off I was all for this thin gold ribbon Veronica imagines connects her to Evelyn, but this is too much

  “Oh, I don’t know,” says my mother “I guess you were asleep What’s that look for?”

  “Because I learned how to put on makeup from a fucking Cosmopolitan magazine ”

  “No wonder you wore so much eyeliner,” deadpans Veronica

  Very funny, Veronica. My mother picked an adolescent girl to do mother-daughter stuff with and it wasn’t me I’m so touched

  “So you remember,” says my mother “I did some fashion shows over on Fifty-seventh Street It was different then This is when they had the models right in the store I had a scholarship, but that was only for tuition. Harriet Bukowski, a girl from the neighborhood, she was doing it and she got me in with her agency. They were over in Times Square. What a sleazy place! Every assignment I had to check and double check to make sure it was on the level They were always trying to send me to camera clubs. That was how I met Allen.”

  “Allen?” I’m beyond confused I wonder if this is another memory lapse.

  “Her first husband,” Veronica informs me.

  “Thanks. But I thought you knew him from Brooklyn ”

  “Sure she did,” Veronica says

  “Of course I did. But I hadn’t seen him in years. He moved to the city, let me see, nineteen fifty-three. Four Nineteen fifty-four His father made all that money in the candy business. First they moved over to Prospect Park West, then to Manhattan They sent him to fancy schools, boarding schools, then to Yale He saw me at one of the shows, he was there with a girl he was dating from Yale. Nancy Brown She was from such a wealthy family, I couldn’t believe they let her go out with a boy like Allen New money Her father was like a diplomat or something

  “So, he recognized me in the show, and somehow he got my phone number from the agency, which they were not supposed to do, and called me the next day. I had always had a crush on him And now’ So grown up, so educated. Everyone was so happy.”

  “How did you find out he was gay?” asks Veronica.

  “Well, it was the sex. There was no sex. We did it once, on our wedding night, and he could never do it again We never fought, we got along so well, everyone was so happy, I thought I could live without it But then I really knew when I walked in on him and Bo Anderson, the theater critic for The Times, in bed together. Allen was giving him a blow job. Of course I had suspected, but then I knew for sure ”

  One week later Veronica shows me the pictures and they’re beautiful. Evelyn looks relaxed and happy and totally in her element I’m always surprised when Veronica turns out to be as talented as she thinks she is When I show the pictures to my mother she’s so happy with them she insists on taking me and Veronica to El Quijote, the Spanish restaurant in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. We only go to the best places now, the restaurants we used to save for special occasions. Evelyn didn’t cook, especially after she sold the house on Twelfth Street, and in the apartment on Commerce Street we had books, furniture, clothes, and television, but never food. When Evelyn and I had meals together, two or three times a week, we went to restaurants The Blue Mill was three doors down on Commerce Street. All the staff knew us and I always got a free dessert from the chef, Jerry. He was from the same part of Brooklyn as my mother and if he wasn’t busy, which was rare, he would sit with us while I ate my dessert and he and Evelyn would talk about how much Brooklyn had changed. It was the recession, and all the change was for the worse. The old neighborhood had gotten so bad, he said, his mother couldn’t leave her house after dark. Of course we went to Antonio’s often, Japonica two or three times a month, El Quijote on special occasions, the Waverly Coffee Shop on weekends when every other place was too crowded, and Empire Szechuan for Chinese when we couldn’t think of anything else On Sundays we would come out of hibernation and leave the Village, we would meet Erica and go down to Chinatown for real Chinese food, we would go to Peter and Maeve Angleton’s for Sunday supper, we would go North, back up toward Twelfth Street, and meet Jake, our old tenant, at Pere Francois, a French restaurant where we would get snails in garlic butter Jake would ask me if I wanted to have a tea party and I would say, no, I’m too old for that now, and we would both laugh, it was our own little joke. Even if we weren’t meeting someone else, Sundays were good, we’d go to brunch at Sweet Basil’s on Seventh Avenue and eat eggs Benedict and fresh squeezed orange juice in tiny glasses, we’d go to Ratner’s down on Delancey Street where the milk was served in little white porcelain jugs

  We didn’t have a lot to talk about over our meals together, Evelyn working all
the time, neither of us interested in school, both of us trying as hard as we could to forget the past, and so mostly we talked about books Evelyn would ask me what I had read that week, what I had liked about the book, what I didn’t like, what I would have done differently Sometimes she would read the same books as me so we could have a real discussion Evelyn and Erica and I spent a whole Sunday at Erica’s house in Connecticut talking about the All-of-a-Kind-Family series By the end of third grade I had exhausted the school library and Evelyn didn’t trust the selection at public libraries. Then we started going to bookstores on Sundays after we ate, and that was even better than Ratner’s Bleecker Street Books on Bleecker and Seventh, St Mark’s Books when it was still on St Mark’s Place, the Strand on Twelfth and Broadway, Books of Wonder and all the other stores on Eighteenth Street This was even better than the restaurants.

  Most of the bookstores are still around but most of the restaurants have closed since then, or gone under new management, or redecorated, wrongly, or just declined But some are still around and good and it’s those restaurants we go to now, the restaurants that feel like home The best places. While there’s time Manuel, the headwaiter at El Quijote, shows us pictures of his children after he seats us—Juan is at M I.T now The busboy shows us pictures of his college graduation. He’s starting with Saatchi &. Saatchi next month. Arthur Manville, a writer who lives in The Chelsea, is sitting across the room with his wife, Michelle, and they come over and show us pictures of their grandchildren—Alain is at St. Elizabeth’s now I tell everyone about my job and everyone reacts like Evelyn did when I first told her. Oh Computers. Oh. I respond to each Oh with a silent shanaishwaraya. Veronica’s latest project, however, a short about fast-food workers, is a source of endless fascination.

  Manuel tells me to get the lobster in puff pastry I order it. He tells my mother to get the crab special. She does He tells Veronica to get the paella. She orders the most expensive dish on the menu, lobster tail and steak in brandy cream sauce Last year Veronica’s parents cut off her allowance, after buying her the apartment she lived in, and now she thinks she’s a regular starving artist

  “Did I ever tell you about the first time I came here?” Evelyn asks.

  “No, what happened?” says Veronica

  She’s told me at least a dozen times but I know she loves this story so I say, I don’t think so.

  “This is when I was at Columbia, in between my first husband and my second husband I was on a date with a guy from the university Teddy Tedderton was his name, believe it or not He was rich, from some suburb Scarsdale, Westch-ester, something like that, and he was trying to impress me. What a schmuck’ He thought he was really something, Teddy Tedderton. He thought he was hot shit All through the salad, all through the appetizer, talking about how great he was, how many awards he had won, how much money he was going to make, how all the society girls were chasing after him. Then halfway though the steak”—this is where Evelyn starts laughing, and Veronica and I laugh along with her—“halfway through the steak a piece of meat got stuck in his throat and the waiter had to do the Heimlich maneuver on him. The steak went flying across the table and Teddy threw up all over the floor. He was so embarrassed he burst into tears, and then he ran out of the room and out to the street So there I am with half a steak and no money. The manager was very nice Alonzo, he hasn’t worked here in years I told him I couldn’t pay the bill; he let me finish my steak anyway, and even gave me a dessert on the house Chocolate mousse. He says, ‘If there’s anything else I can do, just let me know.’ You know, like did I have a way to get home. I had a token and like, five dollars in my purse, thank God The next day I sent a thank-you card to him—Alonzo—along with the cheapest bouquet of flowers I could find, and even those, day-old snapdragons, broke the bank. I had to do something, for Christ’s sake.”

  Chapter 10

  On January 15th Evelyn sends out a press release announcing her retirement. On January 21st her interview with the author of Silver Moon is scheduled to take place, which is, since the announcement, a much bigger deal than it was before What had started off as a little Q and A will now be a cover story, and Evelyn is happy about it. Going out with a bang

  Except that the interviewer, Colin Cauldwell, doesn’t want me to be there And he doesn’t want Allison to be there And he will not agree to the stipulation that Evelyn sticks to in all interviews that she will not talk about Michael’s suicide, or about me And he wants it to take place in his office, at nine thirty on a Saturday morning, because he’s a very busy man with very important things to do and cannot spend a whole afternoon on this little interview.

  So Evelyn gets the editor of The New York Times, whose granddaughter did an internship at GV last summer, on the phone and explains the situation to him And now Colin Cauldwell is out of a job and twenty-five-year-old Joshua Phillips, author of a new memoir about growing up in a Utopian commune in California, will be coming over to Evelyn’s apartment on a Saturday afternoon, where Evelyn and Allison and I will be waiting, to talk about whatever my mother wants for as long as she wants

  Joshua comes over at three o’clock, which is a good time for Evelyn—she doesn’t have to offer anyone more than a beverage Joshua is new to shoe-wearing society and he doesn’t know enough to be intimidated by the shrewish little cabal of Evelyn, Allison, and me, but he’s open and friendly and adorable, with his long hair and smooth skin, and we like him immediately He sets up his tape recorder and tells us that he’s subscribed to the Greenwich Village Review since he was fifteen He’s always dreamed of having his writing published by Evelyn Forrest and now he’ll never have the chance.

  “You have no idea,” he says, “what GV has meant to people like me. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t in New York, I wasn’t even in the world. No one read that kind of stuff in the commune.”

  “That’s so nice to hear,” says Evelyn, smiling. “No one read where I grew up either. I had an aunt who read romance novels, she was like the big bookworm But I’m surprised people didn’t read in the commune I would have thought they were intellectual ”

  “Some people did,” Joshua says, “but it was all practical stuff You know, animal husbandry, agriculture Fiction was considered decadent. So if no one around you read, how did you ever get into books?”

  “Oh, I don’t know how that happened It always made everyone so happy when I did well in school. I was going to go to Brooklyn College and become a teacher, my parents were obsessed with this I was going to be the first professional in the family A schoolteacher. So if I was reading, if I was in the library, everyone was happy. But when they found out what I was reading, that was a different story.”

  “What were you reading?” Joshua asks

  “Oh, all the dirty stuff D H Lawrence, Henry Miller, these were like black market books, you had to know someone who knew someone who could get them for you Once my mother caught me reading Beckett, she saw it had no spaces, no periods, she almost had a heart attack ”

  “What were your parents like?” Joshua asks.

  “Well, they were typical of their whole generation. Where they were from, in Poland, they were so poor that my mother’s brother died from malnutrition He starved to death His mother couldn’t produce any milk. I think they stowed away to come here ”

  “They were already married?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure But I know they were just teenagers, and they had known each other in Poland.”

  “What did they work at?”

  “It was hard for them Luckily my father was a very talented man He did carpentry, cabinetmaking, anything with wood By the time he retired he was really doing well, he did restoration for all the Victorian homes in Brooklyn. So people would pay him cash. But it was hard, he didn’t even have a bank account My parents literally kept their money in the mattress ”

  “Did you have siblings?”

  “Kind of,” my mother says “Another girl lived with us for a while, a girl from the neighborhood whose parents had die
d. Eva She died when she was seven ”

  “How did she die?”

  “She had a congenital heart disease, a hole in her heart, something like that. Well, that was how I really got into books to begin with, when Eva died. I missed her so much, I just wanted to escape ”

  Joshua looks a little nervous as he moves on to the next topic “Your first husband, Allen Chernowitz . . he was—”

  “A fag,” Evelyn interrupts, saving Joshua the stress “He was gay. I found out after we were married for only like, six months I found him in bed with another man ”

  “Did you stay friends?”

  “He’s still one of my best friends, Allen. Just a few weeks ago we went back to the old neighborhood together He’s in the wheelchair now, my God did he look old, but of course I wouldn’t tell him that We went back to where he had lived, where my parents had lived None of those people would have anything to do with him, you know, after he came out. He missed them all so much, his parents especially. Oh yes, they were still alive. Can you imagine? Here he was, a millionaire five times over, pining away over a bunch of immigrants in Brooklyn—plumbers, shopkeepers, butchers—who snubbed him I keep telling him, forget about it already, you’ve made all this money with the computers, you’ve got a beautiful boyfriend half your age He doesn’t want to hear it Those fucking bastards ”