“Tea, please, thank you.”
Houston to Mette. Do we have a problem?
She looks up to see Quentin coming through the door.
It’s ridiculous, but sometimes she’s still surprised to see him all grown up, in a dapper black wool coat with a leather satchel over his shoulder and black-framed glasses shaped like CD slots over his adorable blue eyes. He’s thirty-nine, for chrissake, but family myths are as hard to dislodge as ticks, maybe there are a few sugary drops of big-sis self-satisfaction she can still squeeze out of picturing him at seven, stumbling around pigeon-toed and clueless, letting drool gather on his chin, occasionally still wetting his bed. Maybe she misses having a boy who so nakedly needed her, so openly loved her. (I see our time is up, Saskia. See you next week.)
“Pretty frigid out there, huh?”
He comes over, glances at her coat and tea. “Aren’t you cold here?”
“I’m fine; I like being by the window.”
He shrugs off the satchel, unwinds a scarf, dips bilaterally out of his coat. He’s got a charcoal cardigan on over his olive buttondown. The lime tie is either intentionally bold, endearingly boy-blind, or ironic. He’s six feet tall, shaven, fit. He couldn’t look more adult if he tried.
“How’s Annabelle?” she asks.
“Sleeping better now. The walking tires her out, I think.”
Annabelle is fourteen months. “And Marly?” Quentin’s wife, a social worker.
Small talk, luscious waitress, apologies!, menu scan, luscious waitress redux. Quentin comically can’t keep his eyeballs from rolling all over her sleek surface.
He works for a small architecture firm, finds most of what he does boring, but the partners count on him, will probably offer him a partnership in three more years, though he says he doubts he’ll accept. He’s tempted to launch out on his own with a friend from graduate school. He’s more settled and responsible than she’s ever managed to be.
When did she stop calling him Quinnie? He started requesting it in his teens, never insisting, and it took her three or four years, she’s chagrined to recall, before she took the idea seriously. None of the rest of the family ever made the switch. To them, he was still the foggy, weepy boy, coming home with notes from school about homework he’d never done, which he seemed not to know he’d ever been assigned. The 1580 he got on his SATs at sixteen didn’t make so much as a golfball ding on the shiny bumper of the Quinnie Slowmobile the family loved driving around in.
Half an hour of Annabelle news, for which Quentin keeps apologizing, but Saskia loves babies, misses the hell out of the seeming thirty-six hours during which Mette was a member of the tribe. In the old days, Quentin would have had snapshots to rock out of his wallet, but now he passes her his phone, and she tosses the glowing photos around like Tom Cruise conducting (literally!) an investigation in Minority Report. (The fact that she even notices this marks her, she’s pretty sure, as over-the-hill.) She hasn’t seen Annabelle in several weeks. “Oh my god, she’s adorable.” Embarrassed by the foam-mouthed avidity that Quentin can no doubt see in her glowing blue face, she retreats into self-mockery via Valley Girl channeling: “Ohmygawwd! Like—tcha!—I mean—ohmygawwd!”
She hands the phone back. “Just send me the entire contents, OK?”
The food arrived a while ago. Quentin is half done, she has hardly started. Her portions are too big, she’ll let Quentin vacuum. She’s switched from tea to hot water, something she discovered years ago. Great for the cords.
“How’s Mette?” Quentin asks.
“Oh, the usual.”
“Yeah?”
“Doing her own thing.”
“She’s a fascinating young woman.”
“That she is.”
“I really like her.”
She wishes Quentin wouldn’t say that. She wants Quentin to be special, and this is what Saskia’s friends always say. No, really, I do like her!
“Well, she likes you.” She tries to remember if Mette has said word one about Quentin or anything remotely connected with Quentin in the past few weeks or, hell, ever. “She’s interested in that building that’s going up on whatever, you know—near Union Square, is it Fourth Avenue and something? With the copper panels.”
“I know the one. Why’s she interested?”
“She mostly doesn’t articulate to me her reasons for being interested in something.” Three or thirty months ago she emailed Saskia some photos she’d taken. Mostly close-ups of the panels, with streaks of reflected light, little dimples harboring distorted images, pools of darker color. Her caption said: get a load of these.
As usual, Saskia didn’t know precisely what load she was supposed to get, but nurtured a small hope that her daughter might help her out. She opted for generic encouragement. Wow. They’re beautiful.
Mette answered immediately, meaning this really was the object on her radar at the moment. you think so?
Saskia hated it when she did that. Did she mean it to be a test, or was she just being oblivious? Backtracking, hedging your bet, wimping out with a don’t you? was never wise, Mette hated opinions that weren’t sincere. Well it was perfectly plausible to see them as beautiful, so fuck her. Yes I do.
Mette didn’t answer.
Was that a conversation?
“I want to hear more about what you’re doing,” she says to Quentin.
“Futzing with windows on an ugly apartment building.”
“But I’m actually interested. What’s the futzing you’re doing?”
So they spend the rest of the meal on that, on bathroom placement, on which way doors open and why, concrete strength, cautious engineers, crazy clients, squabbling partners, with detours into Marly’s fatigue, her own boss troubles, her encouragement that Quentin start his own business before his soul gets crushed, their fixer-upper off Cortelyou in Brooklyn that is turning out to need work costing the equivalent of two brand-new houses of equal size, plus several long sudsy baths in everything Annabelle.
Quentin vacuums. Saskia’s heart warms. She’s Ma on the prairie, rough reddened hands on hips, watching her strapping
