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  “Absolutely not,” I insist, enjoying the privilege of being indignant. “Besides, lately my writing has been bringing in something larger than the usual modest check.”

  Is there new respect in her eyes, a dawning sense that the goodies have been parceled out more equally between potential siblings after all.

  Between the time the check is brought and paid—Jake the real estate lawyer thinks the tip should be figured with tax included, Harriman the tax lawyer insists the tax should be subtracted; they compromise—the arrangements with Max have been settled. In a few days I am to have him for four days. “With Daniella,” I say.

  “With Daniella,” Zenobia agrees.

  We put on our coats and go outside. The air is clear, cold, but there’s no wind. The ice is melting. The sidewalks are sludgy with puddles and hardened ridges of old snow. A crowd is letting out from the Loeb a block away. People are walking gingerly trying to avoid the murkiest pools. A Robert Wilson version of an Ibsen play has been running for two weeks and some of the theatergoers look as if they’ve been sprung from life imprisonment. “Everyone could hear you snoring,” a woman complains to her companion.

  Farther along Brattle Street, a musician twangs Bob Dylan from the doorway of Cardullo’s shop. Near Church Street a parade of teenagers in studded leather and streaked hair are heading to the Harvard Square Theater for the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show.

  Zenobia and Harriman go to fetch their car from the lot under the Charles Hotel. Jake Barnes and I stand in companionable silence eavesdropping on Ibsen’s bad reviews. When the last of the stragglers go by, I turn to him. “I really could walk home,” I say, “it’s a fine night.”

  “Not alone.”

  “I do it all the time. It’s perfectly safe.”

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  “That’s ridiculous. How will you get to Lexington?”

  “I’ll take a cab.”

  “To Lexington?” I ask, sounding like Seamus O’Toole in one of his tightwad fits of incredulity.

  “Then I’ll take the T to Alewife, and find a cab from there.” He pauses. “Or …” he says, eyebrows quizzical as question marks.

  “Or?” I ask.

  “Or I could spend the night.” He’s avoiding my face, concentrating on a puddle forming a skim of ice near the corner of my boot. But he must have eyes in the back of his head to register my astonishment because he adds quickly, “On the couch or in a sleeping bag.”

  I shake my head.

  He looks sheepish. “Do you think I’m the kind of guy who expects to take a girl, woman—sorry—to bed on the second date?” Implying that I’m not the kind of girl—woman—to go to bed with a man on a second date. I should be flattered. I’m not. Instead, I think of Louie, of our first date, which we technically missed since we were so fully occupied in bed. I’m afraid I’ve turned into a slut, albeit a selective one.

  And it’s not that I don’t like Jake Barnes either. He’s sweet, the way he’s breaking up pieces of ice with the toe of his shoe. The way he smiles so shyly at me. The way he tries to find a balance between Emily Post and Betty Friedan.

  “Besides, you look tired, Katinka,” he says now with Leonard Woolf solicitousness. “Warm milk, my article, and a good eight hours is what Dr. Barnes prescribes.” He pauses. “Can I ask you one thing?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Is there someone else?”

  “It’s complicated,” I say. “I mean there’s someone, but I’m not sure how serious …”

  He holds up his hand like a traffic cop. “You don’t need to say anything more. So long as I’m a contender.” He lowers his hand. It brushes against mine, then hangs there as if his glove and my mitten are clothespinned to overlap slightly on a line. I’m just about to ask him contender for what? when Harriman’s car pulls up.

  Not surprisingly, it’s a silver gray Volvo the inside of which is as shiny and sanitary as Harriman’s ideal restaurant bathroom ought to be. This is in contrast to every car I, through family membership or marriage, ever carried insurance for. These were always litter bins on wheels, filled with Coop receipts, grocery ticker tapes, candy bar wrappers, twigs, leaves, old Life Savers, old gum. If I ever needed spare change I’d only have to run my hand along the ripped and matted rug underneath the front seat to come up with a piggy bank’s worth. Though Harriman’s car lacks the coziness of bad housekeeping, it is a relief to know the back of your coat isn’t going to have something embarrassing stuck to it when you step out to the curb.

  Harriman pulls into Prescott Street and double-parks. I thank Zenobia and Harriman. They thank me. Zenobia says she’ll call me about Max. That we’ll all get together as soon as Arthur and Janet are home. Jake Barnes says he’ll walk me to my door. Harriman says for us to take our time, he wants to warm up the heater, put on a tape, and besides the baby-sitter isn’t expecting them for another hour.

  “Jake will just be a minute,” I say. “He’ll just see me inside the door.”

  And just inside the door, I shake his hand. “Thank you for a wonderful dinner.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  “I did, especially the Chardonnay.”

  He laughs. “What about your stories?”

  “Harriman’s waiting. I’ll mail them to you.”

  He takes out his business card on which he’s already added his Lexington address. “I can hardly wait.”

  “Well,” I say, “good night.”

  “Can we do this again?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m in Chicago next week. On business. Some meatpackers I represent. But I’ll call you when I get back. And I mean it, about helping out with the baby-sitting.” He leans over, then, and kisses me. It’s not as bad as I feared, those lips. They’re soft, maybe a little spongy, but resilient, like ripe honeydew. And he doesn’t press his luck by any action with his tongue. He ends with a brisk smack which feels like correct punctuation. And though his lips aren’t Louie’s lips—and not, as in the Cole Porter song, such charming lips either—there is something about flesh on flesh, a general warmth, a holistic pleasantness. “See you soon,” he says. “And don’t forget the stories.”

  I don’t forget the stories. I shut the door and go immediately to my desk. I fish my three best stories from the file drawer and put them into a manila envelope. I scribble Jake’s address on the front. I lick a row of James Fenimore Cooper stamps—Louie’s stamps— and stick them, lovingly, across the top.

  9

  Sunday night, and I’m on the way to the airport. Traffic stuffs the tunnel like the filling of a sausage. I should have anticipated it, should have left half an hour earlier. I picture my mother and Arthur standing by the curb in front of the American Airlines terminal, tanned, wrapped in the plumage of their tropical leisure wear, toting their cardboard containers of duty-free rum, luggage piled at their feet, eyes searching the spiraling airport lanes. “Maybe Katinka’s been held up,” my mother will say. “She’s usually on time.”

  “Zenobia is always punctual,” Arthur will state unsyllogistically. My car idles in place. I roll up the windows to keep out everybody else’s fumes. I turn off the radio. What was All Things Considered is now a crackle of static with the occasional recognizable word like an unfamiliar language with a familiar Latin root. Driving in on Broadway, I listened to a reporter discussing a starlet’s as-told-to autobiography; how she smoked pot, had an affair with Frank Sinatra, tricked a tycoon into marrying her. This last item grabbed me. I turned up the volume. Cheryl never did that, I thought, segueing from the general to the specific. Cheryl had an abortion so Louie wouldn’t have to marry her. Or so she wouldn’t have to marry Louie. Though why wouldn’t she want to marry Louie, I wonder now. These questions are rattling around inside my skull like a tune that won’t go away. I would like to know Cheryl’s reasons for saying no, what she knew that I don’t know. Not that I am considering marrying Louie. Not that he would even ask. Perhaps she just didn’t want to have the
child. The child that Louie wanted. That Louie insists she wanted. I shake my head. My brain is as clogged as this tunnel. My gray cells have been fried by diesel fumes. There’s no clear path for my thoughts to follow. Still, they keep coming, random and disordered. Frank Sinatra. Cheryl. Starlets. Tycoons.

  I think of great flirts, their poses of devotion, their shining eyes, their tilting heads, the way they listen. But am I so innocent of such wiles? I ask myself, jarred by a chorus of honking that makes me feel as if I’m trapped inside a teenager’s stereo. I remember my own beams of adoration as Seamus’ student. He lectured at Sever Hall where I sat in the front row, my hair freshly washed, my thighs Band-Aided by my most tantalizing miniskirt. I groan at this picture of myself.

  By the time I reached the entrance to the tunnel, the radio had switched from flights of fancy to the flight of political refugees. Shame set in. I was enjoying the frivolous revelations in a celebrity bio when I should have been agonizing over the serious devastation of the dispossessed. I am a shallow person. One who can put down a fellow woman when I myself have made no case for sisterhood.

  If I can just say no to sisterhood, however, I am stuck with daughterhood. I could flee like the outcasts, but still not escape. My mother is not a land from which I can emigrate. Not that I’d really want to. But her absence has somewhat simplified my life. I’m content to be the daughter to a mother in Kingston, Jamaica, or Old Town, Maine. It’s resuming the mantle of daughterhood in Cambridge, Mass., that frightens me. No wonder I’ve put it off.

  But not for long since the lanes of cars are beginning to move. Progress is as sluggish as a humid summer’s breeze. Still, the speedometer’s crawling above zero, and I’ve already passed two of the yellow lights set a foot apart into the tunnel’s white tiled walls. The honking has stopped. Seamus knows a way to the airport that avoids the tunnel altogether. It involves negotiating a maze of gas tanks and produce warehouses. You go past King Arthur’s Motel where the outlines of voluptuous topless dancers are painted on its concrete blocks and where a police officer was killed in a notorious brawl. I’m always afraid of getting lost, having to stop there for directions, and being sold into topless dancerdom. “You’re not well enough endowed,” Seamus once snorted when I confessed my fears.

  “You’re just too cheap to pay the toll,” I accused.

  Today there is no toll. The drivers pay only on the way back. It’s clear sailing to the terminal. I find a parking place my first roll through the lot. There’s time left on the meter. Nearly an hour. My luck holds. No sign of my mother and Arthur shivering on the curb. Inside American Airlines I check the timetable on the hanging computer screen. My mother’s plane is twenty-five minutes late. I am just in time. As I hurry to arrivals, the first passengers are making their way from the gate.

  I see Arthur and Janet before they see me. They are walking arm in arm, a handsome couple, tanned, fit. Arthur wears a blue blazer; my mother a dress printed with coconut palms. Over their shoulders are slung identical turquoise travel bags. Youthful, smiling, they could be an ad for Geritol.

  “Katinka!” my mother exclaims. She manages to hook an elbow through mine without releasing her other arm from Arthur’s brass-buttoned one. My hair gets caught in her eyeglasses as she kisses me.

  When we are disentangled, Arthur pecks each cheek as if he were de Gaulle awarding me the Croix de Guerre. “Ah, Katinka,” Arthur croons.

  On the way to claim their baggage, Arthur and my mother tell me all about Jamaica, about their condo, the food, the other people they met, the comparative restlessness of the natives and tourists. They interrupt each other the way old married people do, the way my quiet father never did. But when Arthur says, “Katinka, we have something to tell you,” my mother turns silent as my father, silent as a stone.

  “What?” I ask, searching my mother’s sealed lips, which are nevertheless turned up into a smile. I think I have a pretty good idea what I’m about to be told.

  Which I never get to hear because a voice calls out “Katinka,” and the three of us turn to face Jake Barnes.

  “What do you know!” he exclaims. He’s holding a briefcase and a leather carry-on and is wearing a Burberry raincoat with its matching plaid scarf. The way the scarf is draped makes him look like he has no neck. I am less sad to see him than I am to see the scarf. I don’t like the obvious status symbols, the Gucci G’s, the Chanel C’s, the polo player embroidered onto Ralph Lauren shirts. My mother doesn’t either though she is more willing to flaunt them when they’re bargains at half the price. When I steal a glance at her she is looking happily expectant with no judgment on her face.

  And though my mind is jumping hoops, my tongue can only stammer stupidly, “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m on my way to Chicago. I told you, remember, about my business trip.”

  “Of course. I forgot.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sure you’ve got more important things to think about.” He looks over my shoulder, he shifts his luggage and holds out his hand. “And you must be Katinka’s mother, there’s no mistaking the genes. I’m Jacob Barnes.”

  My mother extends her own tanned hand, which lies in his like a nut brown egg in a pudgy white nest.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m such a clod.” I make proper introductions. Miss Manners would be proud.

  Jake Barnes pumps my mother’s hand, then Arthur’s. He is smiling broadly. “Professor Haven,” he says, “besides your work, which I studied in a philosophy survey course at Penn, we have another connection. Harriman is one of my best friends.”

  “Jacob Barnes,” Arthur muses. He rolls the name on his tongue as if he is tasting something from a new food group. Fortunately, perhaps because he’s a philosopher, he doesn’t segue to Jake and make the connection we lit majors jump upon.

  “Harriman and I went to the Law School together,” Jake continues, “and Katinka and I—”

  “What a small world,” I break in, “just the other day—”

  But my mother will have none of it. She’s fairly beaming. Her earrings are bobbing with delight; the palm leaves on her dress are rustling with her excited breaths. No diversionary anecdotes about small-world-dom for her. “So,” she zooms, “you’re the friend Zenobia and Harriman arranged for Katinka to meet.”

  “The very one. We’ve already had two dates.”

  From the way she looks, I know she’s about to say something incriminating, something about china patterns, something about how nicely a Burberry can accessorize a wedding dress. “When’s your plane, Jake?” I ask. About to take off, I pray.

  He checks his watch. “About to take off. I’d better hustle to the gate.” He bids a charming good-bye to my mother and Arthur, adding pointedly that he’s sure he’ll be seeing a lot more of them. Delight cloaks my mother like another layer of tan. Then, in front of them, he kisses me half on my upper lip, half on the tip of my nose. I nearly rattle with the aftershocks of my mother’s tremor of glee. I blot my nose with the back of my hand as blatant as a child wiping away a grandparent’s sloppy smack. But neither Jake nor my mother seem to notice this. “I’ll call you next week,” he says, “the minute I get back.”

  I watch him run to catch his plane. His legs splay out from the sides. His briefcase flaps against his coat. He moves like those boys I knew in Old Town who joined the chess club rather than the baseball team.

  “Well,” Arthur says.

  “So,” my mother says.

  I don’t say anything, just shrug.

  “A student of philosophy,” Arthur says.

  “Economics. Philosophy was probably required for the degree.” I am in a deflating mode.

  My mother is not to be deflated. “What an attractive man,” she sighs.

  Little does she realize that what she says is the kiss of death. My mother studied psychology. Shouldn’t she know that the more a mother likes someone the less the daughter thinks of him. “Come on,” I say, “a hunk he is not.”

  “Not tech
nically,” she grants, “but he’s got his charms. In the way of intelligent, well-educated, powerful men.”

  “Powerful?”

  “Like Henry Kissinger. No beauty, and yet he was always surrounded by movie stars.”

  “Mother!”

  But she is dauntless. “Take Woody Allen, for instance. Hardly a heartthrob. But he grows on you. If he came up to me right now in this airport, I’d probably fall at his feet.”

  “I should certainly hope not, Janet,” chuckles Arthur. “Especially after what we’ve read about him.”

  “I’m speaking figuratively, of course. Besides, with you, I’ve got intelligence, education, power, and devastatingly sexy good looks.” My mother awards Arthur some rays of adoration.

  Perhaps flirting’s a genetic defect handed down through my mother’s DNA, dooming me to emulate that which I most detest. I resolve to fight in the face of heredity. After all, I did get over my thralldom to Seamus. I’m not about to regress by some theatrical swooning over Jake Barnes. I picture Jake’s awkward gaited run, the flapping hem of his Burberry. No Ivy League education, no Henry Kissinger power, real or imagined, will turn him into a gazelle. With him I can resist playing Janet Graham. As for Louie …

  “As for Jake Barnes?” my mother asks now.

  “Yes?”

  “Has he been married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Children?”

  “None.”

  “Does he want them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember all the trouble I had having you. A woman’s biological clock …”

  “If he has children, I doubt they’ll be mine.”

  “You never know.”

  “Mother!”

  “They say love is better the second time around.”

  This is a concept I don’t even want to begin to contemplate. Is my mother just spouting the cliché without considering the text? Or does she really believe this. And if so, what does this say about my parents’ marriage, about my childhood on a set of Father Knows Best? Does it boil down to numbers? Does a second love, and its accompanying switch from twin beds to a king-sized one cause passion to increase exponentially? This is a problem Arthur could probably reduce to its logical components. Draw me a diagram that I could see.