Nessa is any smarter, Maddy thought, she won’t let love cramp her career. Nessa would also likely be of childbearing age and equipped with a slush fund—who else could afford to work in publishing?
What was she doing with such thoughts. Nick couldn’t want to fuck around with the best thing that had happened to either of them. She inhaled the freshness rising off the earth and watched the swallows, shaped like tiny archers, carve up the dimming light. Love found later in life made you wolfish to get your arms around the last best time. Alert to any disturbance in the field. Including all the imagined ones.
CHAPTER 2 The Three Doors
Bailas como gringa. Ma, the merengue’s just a two-step: drop the hip, drag your leg at the same time.” Laila demonstrated, high, round ass switching, Latina cool. She wore ripped jeans and a dish-rag tee, the uniform favored by private-school kids and crack addicts. She turned the salsa to ghetto-blaster volume, and they hit it again, Maddy, a tad shorter than her daughter, melting into the moves. “Eso es! Way to go, Ma. . . .” As they rounded a standing lamp, Maddy’s toe caught on the Persian carpet; carrying Laila with her, she flopped onto the sofa, both of them laughing.
Laila’s body had all the heft of a finch. Along with the merengue, she’d acquired a parasite from her Latin travels; insisted she was cured, but why should a mother stop worrying?
Maddy lowered the music and ogled her newly redone living room. The parlor level below a monkish space with two Steinway grands—but here on the second floor, a paean to Olde English: window seat in a William Morris greenwillow chintz; the new “heirloom” Persians Nick teased her about. Her flame-stitch wing chair, acquired in the lean days from Goodwill and reglued—talismanic. When they weren’t together at the Point, Nick shuttled between here and a studio near his office. They enjoyed days off; from long habit each needed solitude. Nick had clocked a twenty-five-year marriage; she’d lived with Marshall for six—yet till they found each other, essentially they’d both been alone.
“Lou, let’s teach Nick the merengue next weekend,” Maddy said.
Laila slid down on her tailbone, coarse reddish curls fanning around features set a tad close in her face. The greenish eyes and caramel skin turned heads (while Maddy, slightly famous, was edging toward invisible). Her enchanting smile, like aromatherapy, made people around her happier in their skin. “Uncle Nick dance?” Laila pursed her pillowy lips. “No way.”
“Honey, he’s not such a stiff.”
Laila loved Nick—now that her loyal heart had forgiven him for displacing Marshall. She was comically protective, coaching Nick, a WASP relic, in modern folkways. Last summer she’d gone to Nicaragua to help build a school—in a village menaced by cholera—and returned to the States with a calling: to photograph the Third World’s poor in the manner of Sebastião Salgado. This summer she was headed for Juárez with a photojournalist to document the fallout from global capitalism. The child had been born with a social conscience the way she herself had with perfect pitch. . . .
Maddy sank into her wing chair; four A.M. Europe time, and she was caffeinated with fatigue. Her eye wandered over a weekly lying open on the coffee table. She made out the byline Jed Oliver. Tenants’ lawyer, unlikely mix of social climber and wolfman—and her daughter’s fortyish boyfriend. Laila had started late, clinging longer than quite normal to Babar the elephant king and a battered picture book of Greek myths, dreaming and playing solitary games among the gardens and crumbling statuary encrusted with lichen at Conscience Point.
“Lo, something I wanna talk to you about.”
“Oh, brother.” Laila slid down on her neck, legs akimbo, caramel knees poking through her jeans. How had this child gotten so thin?
“Of course we all admire Jed Oliver for the cases he takes on, but isn’t he a little—”
“Old for me.” Laila always a beat ahead. “Like who gives a shit?”
Maddy startled. Laila never took this pit-bull tack; she was more Ferdinand, dodging the picadors to sniff the flowers. Maddy heard her friend Sophie: If a guy’s white, employed, and dates psychiatric social workers, he thinks he’s exempt from AIDS, so why spoil the moment fumbling for a Trojan. “Uh, y’know, Jed’s run through an awful lot of women,” she said.
“Ma. No one does unprotected sex anymore.” In case Maddy doubted the existence of telepathy. “Look, he’s just a guy I hang with, I’m almost nineteen, I know what I’m doing. Give it a rest.”
That un-Laila harshness again. “Lo-ey, it’s just . . . I don’t want you to associate love with unhappiness.”
Laila’s gaze turned inward like a child’s beneath her straight black lashes. As when she’d first learned about body bags, when Maddy had taken her—mistakenly; unforgivably—to All That Jazz. Peeling off the couch, Laila loped to the mantel and scowled at the photos in ornate silver frames: herself smiling gap-toothed from a rowboat in Central Park; standing with Nick, suited up and beaming from the dazzled slopes of Bromley—scenes of ordinary family happiness. Though Laila’s passage into Maddy’s safekeeping had been anything but ordinary. The official story: Maddy had adopted her from a foundling home in Rabat, Morocco, a star child in a carton grasping a silver rattle—a story about as credible as Babar.
Laila toed the copper fire fan with her black hightop. “Mom, there’s something I gotta tell you.”
“Oh, brother.” Echoing Laila as a joke, yet her throat tightened.
“The thing with Jed—it’s just not where I’m at anymore.” A little huff of exasperation, an Ashcroft tic. “I’ve decided to leave college for a while and go work in Guatemala.”
Maddy pitched forward in her chair. “Drop out?”
“Arghh”—Laila favored comic-book expletives. “No, take time out. Anyway, your view of Brown is totally unreal. Kids are like, Hello, who’s Beowulf? They fly the Concorde to Paris, they do lines in the dorm. And there’s this new course, a workshop on sex toys—”
“Surely you can find some worthwhile courses. Tara Gerson took time out from Yale and ended up in Oregon in a lesbian commune.”
“So? I cannot stand your homophobia.”
Maddy felt she’d wandered into someone else’s movie. Laila usually caressing and wise, with greater tact than the nominal grownups. She was nice even to telemarketers! You two are like sisters, people would say, not altogether approving. Yet recently, Maddy now recognized—her thinking slowed by fatigue—Laila had turned moody and irritable; she sometimes lashed out in anger at the least provocation. Since . . . before the vacation in France?
“Guatemala’s a dangerous place,” Maddy continued, skipping over eggshells. “Those coeds hijacked and raped. The nuns murdered in El Salvador.” Thanks to her daughter, she’d become an expert on mayhem south of the border.
“Third World violence comes out of the policies of the companies you and Nick invest in—they bleed Latin America dry. And lookit what’s going down right here. Building owners, like your buddy Amos Grubb, are fucking over the maintenance workers who’ve gone on strike, bringing in younger workers they can pay less. Someday they’re gonna raze the mansions on Midas Lane.”
Oh,
