“That was my husband’s idea.Marshall was sort ofa friend ofhis family.Well, there have been many changes oftopic since then.God.All this time offfrom school, all this marriage and motherhood, it’s sort of gummed up my brain.I’m in a state ofconstant confusion.”
“I never liked school,”Daniel says, though it’s not true.He’s not sure why he said it.
“I like school.I just don’t like my brain right now.”Her laugh is soft, heartrending.She pushes the sleeves ofher sweater up, showing her ar-ticulated forearms, dark and hairless.“I better get out ofhere,”she says.
“This is ridiculous.You didn’t even get your coffee.”
“It’s no big deal.”Her heart is racing;how long will it take him to figure out that the waitress is deliberately not serving her?“Anyhow, you said the coffee’s not very good here.”
“Well, at least drink the water, the water’s excellent.”
Outside, they linger for a moment.“Becky was weird in there,”
Daniel says.
“Becky?”Iris can feel it coming;he is going to declare himself outraged on her behalf.He is going to be her prince in shining liberal armor.
“Yes, our waitress,”he says.He feels a quickening, he has found a way to say what he has wanted to say for so long.“The thing about Becky is she’s weird around beautiful women.”There.It’s said.He makes a helpless ges-ture, as ifhe were tossing up his life, seeing where it would land.He doesn’t dare look at her.“Because you are.So extraordinarily beautiful.”
“Oh.”She says it as ifhe were a child who has come up with something adorable.“Well, thanks.”
“I still owe you a cup ofcoffee,”he says.“How about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,”she says.
He watches her as she hurries toward her car.Her generous bottom, her funny little run.The sky is dark blue and the autumn sun is warm and steady, as ifpromising that winter will never arrive.A slow breeze moves down the street, carrying the perfume ofthe slowly dying leaves, a nearby field’s last mowing, the river.What can the world do to you with its beauty? Can it lift you up on its shoulders, as ifyou were a hero, can it whoopsie-daisy you up into its arms as ifyou were a child? Can it goad your timid heart, urge you on to finally seize what you most shamefully desire?Yes, yes, all that and more.The world can crush you with its beauty.
Back in the city, Daniel’s firm had offices that took three floors in a styl-ishArt Deco building on LexingtonAvenue, with astrological mosaics in the lobby, and arte moderne numerals over the filigreed brass elevator doors.But here in Leyden his place ofwork is as humble as his practice, two rooms in a wood-framed building near the center oftown.It’s an ungraceful, stolid sort ofbuilding, the architectural equivalent ofa schoolmarm, a nun, a maiden aunt;it once had been, in fact, a board-inghouse, from1925to1960,owned by two musical, free-thinking German sisters, and run exclusively for local unmarried women—gen-teel shop-women, schoolteachers, and a woman named Marjorie Inger-soll, who had a small private income that she supplemented by giving painting and drawing lessons, and whose cheerful landscapes, with their agitated skies and roller coaster hills and valleys, are still displayed along the stairways and in the hallways.Now, the house has been turned into an office complex, where Daniel rents a two-room suite, where century-old locust trees scrape their branches against the windows at the wind’s slightest provocation.Eight hundred and fifty dollars a month, which back in the city would get him thirty square feet in Staten Island.
Daniel climbs the back stairs to the second floor, so lost in thought as he replays and what-ifs this morning’s meeting with Iris that he forgets today’s first appointment will be with his parents, who have announced that they wish to review their last will and testament.Daniel is not their lawyer;the meager bits oflegal business they have generated throughout their adult lives have been handled by one ofthe town’s old-timers, Owen Fitzsim-mons, an ectoplasmic old sort with funereal eyes and icy hands.Fitzsim-mons was a longtime chiropractic patient ofDaniel’s father’s, and while Mrs.Fitzsimmons was alive, the two couples took golfing vacations to-gether to Phoenix and San Diego, formed a wine-tasting club that was quite a success in Leyden in the late1970s, and one summer traveled together to Scotland and Ireland, where they stayed in castles, golfed, and came back home percolating with plans to retire and expatriate to what they continu-ally referred to as“the British Isles.”When his parents called for an ap-pointment, Daniel had wondered ifthere’d been some falling-out with Fitzsimmons, though that seemed to him unlikely.Daniel found Fitzsim-mons both vain and dour, a chilly man in a worn blue blazer with some mys-terious crest over the pocket.But then Daniel’s parents—Carl and Julia Emerson—were no less dour, and even shared with Fitzsimmons whatever circulatory difficulty it is that prevents one’s hands, fingers, and particularly fingertips from getting the blood flow necessary to keep them at a mam-malian temperature.Because their work entailed touching people, both of them were continually blowing on their hands to try to warm them.
Daniel’s secretary is named SheilaAlvarez.She is a stout, round-faced woman.She wraps her dark braids so they sit like a woven basket on top ofher head, and she wears complicated necklaces with tiny stones, bits of seashell, and pantheistic amulets.The least alluring ofthree daughters, she is one ofthose women who get stuck with the task ofcaring for ag-ing, suffering parents, and when they died she was all alone in the world, and too emotionally spent to do anything about it.She has a far-flung net-work ofwomen friends, with whom she is continually on the phone.She is, however, unfailingly efficient, and since getting ill last winter, when Daniel not only protected her job during a long convalescence but also paid for the hospital charges that the insurance company didn’t cover, she is fiercely loyal to Daniel, protective and vigilant, as ifthe office were un-der continual attack, or threat ofattack, though, ofcourse, it is not:it’s just a humdrum rural practice, with one criminal case for every ten real estate closings, and even the criminal cases rarely come to trial.
This practice barely affords him a decent living—in fact, he’s not really clearing much more than he pays Sheila—and it is as close to his for-mer, sleek professional life as a campfire is to a blast furnace, and sometimes it is remarkable to Daniel not only that he has chosen this quiet, country life but that he finds it so agreeable.True, leaving New York was more like fleeing NewYork, but he could have chosen some-place with more people, better cases, more money to be made.Yet here he is, right back in Leyden, which, for years, every time he left it—dur-ing prep school, college, law school, after holidays, summers, the funeral ofan old grade school buddy—he always assumed he was seeing it for the very last time.Kate, upon agreeing to move to Leyden with him, sensed that Daniel wanted to be near his aging parents, and, despite her misgiv-ings, she didn’t see how she could prevent him from fulfilling his filial du-ties.Though every story he ever told her about his parents made them seem as ifthey were monsters ofreserve, two towering touch-me-nots who treated Daniel as ifhe were not so much their son as their charge, one ofthose boys from a nineteenth-century novel, a boisterous nephew left behind by a floozy sister, an orphan whose parents have disappeared undermysterious circumstances in India, a little human mess it had fallen to them to mop up.
Sheila hangs up the phone as Daniel closes the outer door ofhis office behind him.She is quick to end what was obviously a personal call, but her smile is warm and unrepentant.
“Everything okay here?”he asks.
She puts a short, bejeweled finger over her peachy lips, and then quickly scrawls a note to him on a yellow Post-it.“Your parents are wait-ing for you inside,”it says.
In truth, he has forgotten they were coming, and he
His lips soundlessly form the words.His hand goes to his throat.Sheila laughs, also soundlessly, and then she leans back in her high-tech swivel-ing office chair, and the contraption tilts back so abruptly that it seems as ifshe is going to tip over, which elicits a scream ofshock and delight from her.
“What was that scream?”Daniel’s father asks.
”Sheila,”Daniel says.“Tipping over.”He greets his parents with affection, which he presents to them mildly, delicately, with the kind ofreserve you expect in a funeral home or in an intensive care unit.He kisses his mother gently on the cheek, shakes his father’s hand while keeping his own eyes down.He sits at his desk, runs his hands over its clear, waxed surface.
“So what’s the problem with your wills?”Daniel asks, wanting to take charge ofthe conversation.The last thing he wants to do is to answer their bread-and-butter inquiries about Kate and Ruby, neither ofwhom they have bothered to try to know very well, but whom they would be likely to ask after, for the sake ofform.
Carl and Julia exchange nervous looks, openly, as ifthey are communicating over a client who is facedown on
