The Three Weissmanns of Westport

room. 'Oh, that's outrageous! You poor, poor thing. However, that's why you have me. That's exactly what I'm here for.'

'Christ,' Annie said when Miranda hung up. 'Those people. What's he doing, writing a memoir about writing a false memoir?'

Miranda shrugged. 'One of the few clients I have left. You guys have children, I have has-beens. We all do our bit.'

'But look how great you are with Henry,' Kit said. 'The Awful Authors must have trained you well.'

Miranda beamed.

She's beaming, Annie thought, surprised. She was also surprised that Kit knew the family name for Miranda's clients. It seemed so intimate, somehow. And Kit and Miranda had known each other such a short time — a month? Although they had been together almost constantly during that time. She watched Miranda turn her smile to Kit, not her seductive manipulative smile, but this open, unstudied, happy, beaming smile. Kit, clearly dazzled, blinked at Miranda as if she were a bright light and he a stunned bunny.

This can only end in tears, Annie thought.

This can only end in tears : the words parents used when their children became too exuberant. She reminded herself that Kit and Miranda were not her children. Even her children were no longer her children. They were all grown up. Soon enough they would have their own children. This small boy on the floor who had brought back so many memories was closer to a grandson than a son. She felt suddenly very old and curled up next to her mother on the couch, murmuring, 'Mommy,' as she laid her head on Betty's shoulder.

We are old, she thought. Miranda is old. Miranda must not become a desperate old cougar.

Then again, who was she to say what Miranda should be? Who was she to say what was desperate? That way lies tears, but who was she to say that tears were wrong? You couldn't protect anyone, not even Miranda. Particularly if they did not want to be protected. Particularly from a handsome, attentive young lover. If lover is what he was. A handsome, attentive young lover might, at any rate, take Miranda's mind off the Awful Authors. The Awful Authors were not the victims they had been cracked up to be. They were charlatan victims. It must be galling to a connoisseur of imperfection like Miranda. They were fakes, reproductions, costume, paste. If she could not have authentic victims, then at least she deserved an authentically ordinary, healthy person like Kit Maybank, a man with a real life — if you could call auditioning a real life — to take her mind off all those counterfeit people chronicling their counterfeit lives.

Nevertheless, this could only end in tears.

Frederick was a real man with a real life, she supposed. He worked, and he doted on his children and grandchildren. He woke up in the morning and breathed air blown in from the sea. That was really all she knew of him. Except that he had come up to her apartment one night. He had followed her into the narrow hallway. He had pushed her roughly against the wall, a hand on each of her arms. He had kissed her and pressed against her and surprised her with his urgency, to which her response had at first been the unworthy thought that he had perhaps taken Viagra. Was it just kicking in or about to wear off? Was that what this was all about? 'Erections lasting more than four hours...' The TV commercial flashed through her mind — then her thoughts got gorgeously foggy and she pulled him even closer and they staggered like teenagers to the bedroom.

Annie smiled at the memory. Frederick had spent the night, his clothes scattered across the floor. He had carefully turned off his cell phone, though, probably hiding from those children of his.

9

Betty marveled at the new houses that seemed to lurch out of the ground at ever-decreasing intervals, each one bigger and in a more complicated interpretation of a greater mixture of historical styles than the last. Each new house had a garage with three doors, behind which were three cars, which explained, she supposed, the constant traffic in the town. She drove her own car slowly and disapprovingly to the supermarket and wandered stupefied through the wide aisles. When she marveled at the size of the supermarket, at the abundance of produce and the gigantic cereal boxes of every brand imaginable, Annie told her she was like a Russian refugee in 1983, and she might just as well have been a refugee, that was how foreign she felt. In New York, she had fought her way through the cramped aisles of Zabar's and Fairway or stopped on the corner at the little produce market to pick up some flowers. The bags were delivered, and the doorman kept them for her if she was not home, bringing them upstairs when she arrived, carrying them into the kitchen. Here, she pushed an oversized shopping cart to her car, struggled to get the bags into the trunk, struggled at home to get them out of the trunk and into the house. She enjoyed her shopping trips when she set out. The supermarket spread before her as a place of boundless opportunity, something new and vast and exciting, the way the prairie must have looked to the first settlers of the West. But by the time she got home, Betty was tired and defeated and longed for her old life.

My old life, she would think. And then she would muse on the irony of the phrase. She was young in her old life. She was old in her new life. It didn't add up. She wished she had a doorman.

She never let her daughters know how she felt. What would be the point? Annie went off swimming at the beach in the early morning. Miranda took walks in thunderstorms. They seemed to have adjusted to this country life very well. She would stay in Westport for the time being, for their sakes.

It was not easy. She was not a youngster just starting out. It had not been easy for her in Westport when she was a youngster just starting out, so how had anyone imagined it would work this time? Lou had meant no harm, of course. But Joseph, Joseph of all people, should have known better than to consign her to a cottage in a town with traffic but no place to go.

In New York, Betty and Josie had often entertained when they were younger, and even in the last few years they would invite old friends to dinner. More often than not, though, they would meet their friends at restaurants. There were always new restaurants in New York about which to read, at which to make reservations a month in advance, in which eventually to overeat and overspend. Restaurants had taken the place of movies, which had all become so violent and crude, and children, who had all grown up, in the social lives of the Weissmanns and their circle. Betty wondered where that circle was now. They had perhaps circled around Joseph, for they had certainly not drawn their wagons around her. There were a few close friends — the Harveys and the Littmans — who called regularly and tried to make dates with Betty. And there were her friends from college, Judith and Florence. Nothing changed those friendships, which were intimate and deep and existed still, as they had for decades, almost exclusively on the phone. But Social Life, as Betty once knew it, was gone. The restaurants in Westport were dull and overpriced. There was no movie theater, even if she had wanted to see a film and could have found a friend to accompany her. There was nothing to do, no one to do it with, and she wouldn't drive at night, so on top of everything else there was no way to get there. She daydreamed about the buses in New York with their interesting bits of poetry or quotes from George Eliot, their ads for Con Ed or the Bronx Zoo. How civilized and communal New York seemed from the vantage point of this lonely land of cars and crows and Lanes and Drives and Crescents.

'Oh, it's so peaceful here,' her friend Judith said when she came to have lunch and go to the Westport Playhouse with Betty one day. They walked along Main Street, peering into shop windows. 'You can see the sky! All the stores we have on Madison Avenue, but on this quaint little street. A theater, too! It's got everything New York has, really.'

In some perverse way this was true — the play turned out to be just as dreadful as most of the theater in New York, the shops were frequented by the same loud, slender mothers as the ones who shopped in the city, the styles were too young for Betty, just as they were on Madison, the sky was the same gray swathe high above.

'Very cosmopolitan little town,' Betty had answered her friend in her most chipper voice. But Westport struck her as neither cosmopolitan nor little. In fact, it did not even strike her as a town. It was large and spread out and bustling and provincial.

'If you have to be in exile, Betty, you could do worse,' said Judith, who was no fool and had known Betty such a long time.

Betty smiled at her. How lucky she was to have friends who understood what she meant rather than what she said. 'You're absolutely right,' she said. But as they drove out of the parking lot onto the Post Road, she could not help adding, 'Look at this traffic!'

Cousin Lou's latest event was a particularly large dinner party in honor of Rosalyn's father, Mr. Shpuntov. Mr.