Fabulous At Fifty

by

Rafael Yglesias

Stage One

1.1

Hugh Reynolds was a happily married man, which is to say that shortly after concluding he and his wife were hopelessly mismatched, fated to disappoint each other daily, he realized he was content.  Hugh arrived at this startling epiphany on his tenth wedding anniversary.  He was thirty-one.  Over the next fifteen years he discovered more than contentment in his marriage; he unearthed gladness at growing old with Amy, a profound and abiding pleasure in knowing that she was the last woman he would love, really the only woman he would ever love, since he had met Amy when he was nineteen.  Naturally, along the way there were hiccups in his conviction that his wife was the great love of his life—a day here or a week there when he suspected a platonic crush, if allowed to become physical, would ignite into a grand passion.  Fortunately, such visions quickly vanished, mirages in the desert of contentment in which he burned.

Then Amy died.  It took five years to lose her.  The attenuated ebbing and departure of a woman whose sensibility had been grafted onto his consciousness was sad and terrifying in countless ways—none of which concern this story.  The commonplace terror being singled out here is that no matter how long Hugh mourned—and he expected to mourn for the rest of his life—someday in the incomprehensible future without Amy he would have to go on a date.

“It's been thirty years since my last date and that turned out to be a disaster,” he said, confessing his dread to Leslie, his wife’s closest friend.  Over those same thirty years she had also become precious to Hugh.  During Amy’s illness he had relied on her more than anyone.

“How can you say that?” Leslie objected.  “Your last date was fabulous: you met Amy.”

“Exactly,” Hugh said.  “Then she died.”

Leslie mourned Amy solemnly but was witty enough to concede, “I see your point.”

Hugh couldn't elude dating by proposing to Leslie.  She was married. There were, in fact, several charming women Hugh would have wed without the preliminary bother of dating if it weren't for the inconvenience that they were married.  True, many complained so bitterly about their husbands that they appeared to be available for a second marriage.  But Amy’s death had clarified Hugh’s view of wife-stealing: he now understood why not coveting another’s spouse was a moral imperative worth carving on a tablet and possessed a keen awareness of what a rotten thing it was to steal a wife from any man—even an asshole, which curiously seemed to be just the type intelligent women selected for matrimony.

Luckily for Hugh, in the aftermath of his wife’s death he was too miserable to date.  And too busy.  Besides catching up at the office on what had been neglected during the last stages of Amy’s illness, his days were crammed with gloomy tasks, such as mailing official copies of her death certificate to Chase, Verizon, and American Express to convince them to stop billing for services that even their omnipresent companies could no longer provide her.  Daily encounters with the bureaucracy of death left him with little energy for his evenings; he attempted nothing more strenuous than dinner with friends. These were consoling, but loving company did not obscure the painful sight of the empty chair beside his.  Nothing left him feeling more bereft than dinner for three and a solitary walk home to a silent, dark apartment.  Soon Hugh decided that he preferred to stay in, askew on the couch where he had spent so many contented hours with Amy, staring at the 55-inch flat-screen TV he had bought a week after her funeral—a giant television plopped into their once tasteful living room being the only improvement he believed he could obtain from losing his wife.

“She must be turning over in her grave,” said his mother-in-law, Ruth, when she learned of his high-definition purchase, no doubt wondering what other horrors her son-in-law might bring into her grandchildren’s lives now that her daughter wasn’t there to restrain him.

Ruth was concerned about his life, too.  She was especially worried about his being alone on Yom Kippur.  She called the week before that solemn occasion in October of 2005 to invite him to join her and Amy’s father at their temple.  Hugh Barton Reynolds was not Jewish, unsurprisingly, and so Amy had given him a lifetime pass on going to services with her—until her illness.  He had accompanied her for the past five years and he thought Ruth might have a point.  If he didn’t go to temple would he feel too bereft?  Most of his friends were Jewish enough to repent, so they wouldn’t be available for company.  Nor would his children.  Amy had raised them to be High Holiday observant, but they didn’t want him to assume her role as spiritual nag and synagogue companion:  daughter Ginnie lived in DC, where she would attend services with Amy’s brother, his wife, and their two little boys; and son Raymond had preemptively announced he wasn’t coming into town for the Day of Atonement—not a surprise since he had informed Hugh that if he believed in God he would turn his back on Him for killing his mother.  Ray was spending the weekend in Providence with Mai, his African American girlfriend.

“Celebrating Kwanzaa?” Ruth asked.

“That’s in December,” Hugh said.

She laughed; first time he’d heard her laugh in a year.  “I know!  I was making a joke.  So why not join us at temple for Erev?” she continued in her drained and often cracked or hoarse post-funeral voice.  “You know, evening services?  The night it begins?  Or if you want to come on the day, you could stay for just a little while, not the whole megillah.  And don’t worry.  You don’t have to fast.  After all, you’re not Jewish.”

“Zol Got mir helfen,” Hugh said.

“May God help us all.  I promise I’m not trying to convert you.  I just want you to know you’re welcome.”

“Thank you, dear.  I’ll be fine on my own.  And don’t forget, in a week I’m taking you out for your anniversary.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ruth said.  “We’re paying.”

Hugh had volunteered to have dinner with Ruth and Bernie on their fifty-ninth wedding anniversary because Amy’s brother couldn’t get away due to work obligations and Hugh couldn’t bear the thought of his in-laws—late in-laws? what was the proper term for a dead wife’s relatives?—celebrating alone so soon after burying their daughter. That was one reason why he declined Ruth’s invitation to temple; seeing her twice in two weeks was too often.  Not that he disliked Ruth.  He had grown quite fond of his mother-in-law over the years.  It wasn’t her fault she bore a close enough resemblance to Amy to trigger pangs of loss.  Also, she had a habit of calling him “Hughie” in exactly the same tone as Amy at her most affectionate.  But even if echoes and resemblance had been a comfort, he wouldn’t have been tempted to attend services.  Hugh, like his son Ray, wasn’t in a mood to atone for his sins to God.  This year he thought he was owed an apology.

Ruth worried Hugh was going to be lonely, but of course she didn’t suggest he go on a date.  So far no one Hugh knew had suggested this, which made sense:  nearly every one of his acquaintance was also a good friend of his late wife.  The only one who raised the prospect of his dating did so to inform him that when she saw another woman on his arm she would have a stroke.  As for the two men who were exclusively his friends, Peter and Kyle, they knew he was sleeping less than four hours a night and sometimes sobbed while watching reruns of Seinfeld. For one hundred and twenty days after Amy's plain pine coffin was lowered into an anonymous landscape in New Jersey, no one bothered him about “moving on.”  Four months, however, proved to be the limit for the world to ignore his attractive condition of being a man without a wife.  On Yom Kippur, it became apparent that his tribe was recalling, or more likely Googling, the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice—“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife”—in order to adapt it to his gloomier but perhaps even more attractive circumstance as a widower.  A drumbeat had begun, a call to reintroduce Hugh to the comforts of a romantic relationship.

His happily married friend Peter was the first to make noise.  They had gone to college together, if you could call four years of smoking dope, reading Beckett and writing bad poetry “higher learning.” Like Hugh, WASPy Peter had married a Jewish girl but hadn’t converted.   He rescued Hugh from atonement.  While Debby fasted, Peter came down from “the boring Upper West Side” to Hugh’s “hip Village digs” to take him out for a sacrilegious steak.  He stopped by the apartment first, to smoke a joint on Hugh’s grimy, bare terrace before they walked to the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill.  After their martinis and steaks arrived, Peter leaned forward and announced, “It’s time you starting thinking about dating.  I’m sure you don’t feel ready, but you never will.  You’re a hot commodity, Hugh.  A real catch.  Know what Debby said about you?”  Peter liked to quote his wife, which he did for a variety of purposes:  to submit evidence that she wasn’t kind enough to him; to repeat one of her cutting remarks about a man Peter envied; or to cite her as the ultimate expert on everything.  “Debby said, ‘Hugh stuck around for the cancer.’”

Hugh recoiled, less at the subject of dating being broached than at the idea that Amy’s illness could be reduced to a question on a matrimonial quiz.  And anyway, what sort of recommendation was that?  “Stuck around for cancer?” he said. “Makes me sound ghoulish.”

“Don’t start with the self-deprecating crap, okay?” Peter’s eyes filled.  “What you guys went through . . .” He suppressed his rising tears—before the Daughters of the American Revolution could arrive to clap him in irons, Hugh figured.  “‘Hugh stuck around for the cancer,’” Peter repeated, in love with the phrase.  “Debby says for women that’s the cherry on top of the perfect sundae of your CV.”

“My CV?”

Peter became bellicose, accusing Hugh of his advantages: “You're fifty years old, you're in great physical shape, you were happily married for twenty-nine years, you've raised two brilliant children, one at Yale, the other at Brown, and you have a real job.  Fuck, a job that’s actually interesting.”

“Ginnie graduated.  She's in DC.”

“I know Ginnie graduated!”  Disgusted, Peter leaned back, beer belly ballooning his polo shirt.  In truth, his stomach was inflated more by frites than lager; the formerly chiseled bones of Peter’s college countenance were sinking into a pillow of middle-aged calories.  Having dispatched his own frites, he was steadily consuming Hugh’s.  “The point is:  you're a catch, the Great White Whale every woman wants to harpoon,” said Peter, never a man especially gifted at metaphor.

“I don’t want to marry Ahab,” Hugh objected.  “Or Ishmael.”

“Everybody's talking about it.  No one’s saying it to your face but everybody’s got at least two prospects they're hot to fix you up with.  Last night, knowing I was going to see you, it was all Debby could talk about.  ‘Hugh's ideal,’ she kept saying.”  Peter stuffed four frites into his mouth, washed them down with the remains of his martini, and signaled for another, all while his famished bloodshot eyes focused on Hugh, waiting.  For what? A request to be fixed up?  Amy’s clothes were hanging beside Hugh’s in the closet.  A conflation of Chanel and her essence lingered on his pillow.

“I'm bald,” Hugh finally pointed out.

“That's ideal.  No woman wants George Clooney for a husband.  They want a guy, as Debby said, who will stick around for the cancer.”

“Well, they’d be making a mistake,” Hugh said and added, before he changed the subject for good, “Next woman gets cancer, I’m outta there.”

1.2

Peter’s pitch was offensive, but his timing was congruent with the world’s impatience.  The morning after their steak dinner, Hugh’s email was pinged by Cathy Moriarty, a friend of a friend of Amy’s from when their children were little, the very first email he had ever received from her.  It took him a few minutes to remember who she was.  They had met perhaps five times, in large groups back in middle-school days, when Ray and her daughter were classmates.  Maybe they had had a conversation or two between grabs at passing plates of bland cheese and unsalted crackers, while clutching partially collapsed plastic cups of a piquant white wine with undertones of diesel fuel.  Cathy wrote to say how sorry she was about Amy’s passing, how she had always admired her unfailing good cheer as a mother—a mischaracterization of Amy's bunk-counselor efficiency with her kids—and how painful it must be for Hugh to have lost her only weeks before sending his youngest off to college.  “Talk about empty nest,” she wrote.  “I was feeling sorry for myself after my divorce and my little girl abandoning me for Wesleyan but you poor guy.”

There Cathy revealed a good grasp of what had caused him particular anguish.  Dropping off his baby boy at college, Hugh felt as if they had abandoned each other to lives of desperate loneliness.  But what was his alternative?  Keep his eighteen-year-old son home to languish in front of the 55-inch TV watching the Giants lose?

Cathy went on to write that if he wanted to go for a walk or to come over for a home-cooked meal just to talk, she was more than happy to lend a “sympathetic shoulder.”

Is it only her shoulder I'd want to borrow? Hugh wondered.  He longed to touch and be touched—understandably, since one of the truths universally acknowledged is that a side effect of grief is lust, sex serving as an excellent fuck-you to death.  He suspected Cathy had designed the invitation to circumvent the awkwardness of being the first to ask a widower on a date, and although he was tempted by her shoulder and everything attached to it, he was bothered by the possibility that she might have calculated he would take advantage of her offer of sympathy to gratify his baser appetites.  He believed no man required a woman’s help in appealing to his worst instincts—that was what male friends were for.

The result of his conflicted feelings was that he dithered violently.  Hugh’s libido wrote back instantly that a home-cooked meal would be great.  But when Cathy replied with an invitation for that very night, his conscience took over, and he immediately executed a U-turn in a second email, declining dinner, offering no alternative date.

Five minutes later his landline rang, Cathy’s name glowing on its Caller ID.  With a feeling of doom he picked up.

“Hello, Hugh?  It’s Cathy.  Cathy Moriarty.”

“Sure, Cathy.  I recognize your voice.”  It was tuneful.  “You got my second email?  I just sent it.  You should have it by now.”

“Oh . . .” She paused.  “No . . . I . . . didn’t,” she said haltingly.  Not because she was confused, Hugh decided; he suspected she’d recognized an opportunity he had stupidly created.  “I’m not at my computer so I didn’t see a second one.  I was calling to find out if steak was okay for dinner?  I couldn’t remember if you were a carnivore,” she finished brightly.

Hugh didn’t mind her harmless, friendly fib about seeing his second email.  All’s fair.  He was simply too sad to play.  “Cathy, I changed my mind about dinner.  Sorry.  That’s what my second email was about.  I’m very sorry to be confusing.  Just feeling too tired.”

“Well, how about tomorrow night?  Are you free?” she asked, obliging him to disappoint bluntly.  Disappointing a woman had always been painful for Hugh.  He had never been able to during the wink when he was single—if living in your parents’ house or a dorm qualified as being a bachelor.  Before his epiphany about the contentment of his marriage, Hugh had been nagged by a suspicion that he had proposed to Amy to avoid letting her down.

“Cathy,” he began, then choked up.  She meant well and it pained him to bruise her feelings.  He cleared his throat. “You’re very kind to offer to be a sympathetic shoulder, but I’ve got no shortage of sympathy.  Everyone is being very attentive.”

“Oh that’s wonderful!” Cathy exclaimed.  “I’m not surprised.  So many people love you.  How about I give you steak and no sympathy?”

She was funny.  That was good.  And she was bold.  That too was good.  Hugh liked strong, assertive women, which created a paradox: although he resented that they moved him so easily across the chessboard, he enjoyed the sensation of their confident fingers looping around his will.

Hugh took the risk of full disclosure: “Here’s the real reason, Cathy.  I know you’re being kind, and that’s all you mean to be, but for me, going to your apartment for dinner feels—and I know you don’t mean it this way—but it feels like a date.  And I’m not ready for that.  Sorry.”

“Oh my God!  You thought I was . . . so close to . . . I would never . . . Amy was . . . even I’m still not over . . .” Cathy was so appalled she had been rendered incapable of finishing a sentence.

Hugh hurried to reassure her. “Of course you didn’t mean that.  That’s exactly why I put it all on me.  It just feels weird to me, even though I know it’s the furthest thing from your mind.  I apologize.”

“I understand . . . now that you explain . . . of course it feels strange to have dinner at a single woman’s apartment.  I understand.”

“Thank you.” Hugh congratulated himself for his bravery in being straightforward.  See?  It wasn’t painful at all.

“I have an idea,” Cathy continued with renewed energy. “Tomorrow’s supposed to be lovely.  Picture perfect weather.  I’m going to enjoy the new West Side esplanade, walk it from Twelfth Street down to Battery Park City.  Why don’t you join me?  Get you out of the house.  We’ll stay away from talking about how sad it is to lose people we love.  We’ll stick to talking about the disastrous Iraq war.  I still can’t believe George Bush was reelected!  Was Kerry so boring everyone was willing to destroy the country just to be entertained by that idiot?”

There was nothing for it.  To put Cathy off for good Hugh had to prevaricate.  He thought of himself as a skillful liar but he began to doubt his ability after the dismal performance that followed.  He told Cathy he couldn’t walk this weekend because he would be in DC visiting his daughter.  Naturally enough, she proposed a stroll when he got back.  He explained he was stuck at the office late these days.  “I’ll email when I have a free weekend,” he promised, the opposite of his intention, and ended the call with that hoariest of pretenses, claiming someone was on the other line.  By then, his rejection clear, her tone had chilled.

Disgusted with himself, he tossed the cordless phone onto his home office desk and slid to the scarred oak floor, where he curled into a fetal position, exhausted and defeated by his first encounter as a single man with a woman.  He realized with deepening dismay that twenty-nine years of marriage hadn’t improved his ability to fend off female desires.  He feared what he had learned from his relationship with Amy was that he should always give in.  That had kept his marriage humming but obviously left him hopelessly out of tune for dating.

He picked himself up, shook his head until his cheeks wobbled, then made a thunderous noise by stamping his feet and releasing a growl that expanded into a great roar.  This jungle display heartened him, urged him to be stronger than the inept man in the awkward conversation with Cathy Moriarty.  Ginnie and Ray needed him to avoid behaving like a middle-aged child, to prove he was independent and able to console himself, that losing their mother wasn’t something they needed to worry would unman their father—although clearly it had.

He returned to his desk chair and pondered how to prevent a repetition of such clumsiness.  There followed a half hour of forehead rubbing, staring at his iBook’s beach screen-saver, and making a cup of tea and scalding his tongue, before a solution, albeit temporary, occurred to him.  He remembered what Kyle, his frequently single friend, following a diagnosis of fatty liver disease, had told him was one of the rules of Alcoholics Anonymous.  When you first quit drinking you were to avoid making big changes for a year, including starting a new relationship, to give yourself a chance to know your new sober self.  Kyle had found it extremely difficult to stick to that injunction, as hard as not drinking, but thought it had been crucial to his temperance.  Hugh decided he would institute a one-year moratorium on dating in order to first “date” this Hugh Reynolds, a grown man without Amy, a man he hardly knew.  Now when the subject of “moving on” came up all he had to do was announce that he had decided he wouldn’t be ready to have a relationship for a year, and then everyone would leave him blissfully and morbidly alone.  In the meantime he’d have twelve months to learn how to say no to a woman.

1.3

“You really did everything your wife wanted?” asked Roberto Salazar, Hugh’s grief counselor.  “I think I do everything my wife wants.  But she doesn’t agree.”

Salazar was a cheerfully lapsed Catholic priest with a degree in psychology whom Hugh had found on his employee medical plan.  He was listed as a bereavement therapist.  At their first meeting Hugh had wondered aloud, “Do we have that many deaths?”  “9/11,” Salazar explained.  Hugh was abashed.  He directed the film program of the Hamilton Foundation for the Arts, whose administrative offices had been in Tower Two; while only one of its employees had perished in the terrorist attack, that loss had shivered the entire staff.

“Amy wouldn’t have agreed that I did everything she asked either,” Hugh conceded now.  “But that’s because she was kind and didn’t want to seem to be emasculating me.  When I refused to do something Amy wanted, she would pretend to give in, but really it was just a postponement.  A year or two later, or as many as ten years later—she was a very patient woman—she tried again, knowing I would eventually cave.  So I started giving in right away to avoid the Chinese water torture, the slow drip of her wants.”

Salazar said nothing for a while.  Hugh feared it was an appalled silence.  “It’s good,” Salazar finally said, “that you’re not idealizing your marriage.  Lots of the widows and widowers I see grieve for their spouses by making them into paragons.  And then they get stuck.  Can’t move on.”

Hugh supplied the obvious: “No one else measures up.”

“Exactly.”

Measuring up to Amy: what would that entail?  She had thick auburn hair, warm brown eyes, and a pleasant arrangement of features in a friendly rounded face that Hugh was always relieved to come home to; but she wasn’t a dazzling beauty.  Her personality was elusive.  She could languish in a dream-like state of contemplation, lazy and disorganized for stretches that she redeemed every few months with sustained bursts of energy, able to meet impossible deadlines at work while managing her children and her husband down to the smallest detail.  She was very loving without being cloying.  She teased without being mean.  She was whip-smart, much smarter than Hugh, and he wasn’t dumb.  So there were some qualities of Amy’s he didn’t expect could be topped, but in other areas he could imagine improvement.  Amy didn’t care for symphonies, would tolerate only the decorous calm of chamber quartets, was bored by jazz, and her taste in popular music dead-ended at the Supremes.  She couldn’t digest any spicy cuisine, a shameful waste of New York City’s  international buffet.  She didn’t like any movie over two hours long.  She couldn’t bear violent or horrific Asian movies, not even Kurosawa, or vaguely sad French films—that is, all French films.  She liked to go out for events yet couldn’t bear cocktail parties, which made a lot of the social side of Hugh’s work lonely.  And although Amy enjoyed sex, after twenty years of marriage she seemed to want even more preliminary romancing, for making love to be preceded by an anniversary, a birthday, an afternoon at the Met, dinner at Le Bernardin, or at least pizza at John’s—something in their anchovies?  Yes, he could improve on Amy in some areas.

At this blasphemous thought Hugh waited for lightning to strike him dead.  Once God appeared to be indifferent, he asked Salazar, “So I should bad-mouth Amy as much as possible?”

“I didn’t mean that,” Salazar snapped.  “I meant some people are shocked if a grieving spouse doesn’t turn their lost loved one into a paragon of all virtues. You should praise Amy to those people—her parents, her brother, her close friends.  But it’ll be better for you, and especially good for your children, if you don’t do that all the time.”

“Really?  Especially for my children?”  This was interesting.

Salazar nodded sagely.  “My experience is that what the children of dead parents miss are the years they would have had with that parent. Your daughter and son are relatively grown, right?  Ginnie is out of college?”

“Ginnie’s twenty-three.  Ray’s eighteen.”

“So they experienced their mother as teenagers.  As adults they’ll never get to know her.  We see our parents differently as we get older, see their flaws more clearly, for better or for worse.  If you talk about Amy realistically that would be helpful to them.  Give them what they missed.”

Hugh was relieved.  “So I don’t have to be a hypocrite with them.”

“A hypocrite?” Salazar frowned.  “I wasn’t suggesting you be a hypocrite with anyone.”

“Of course not.”

“Did you feel emasculated by her?” Salazar said, changing the subject with the pouncing air of Sherlock Holmes pursuing a revealing clue.

“No!”

“You said she didn’t want to show off that she was emasculating you.”

“I was kidding.  Exaggerating.  Amy wasn’t a bitch or controlling.  It’s a flaw of my character.  I can’t say no to women.”  Out of tune he sang a gender change in the song’s lyric: “I’m just a guy who can’t say no.”

Salazar looked puzzled.  Apparently he hadn’t left the Roman Catholic Church in order to free up his evenings for musical theater.  “So what you got out of your ambivalence about accepting this woman’s invitation to her house for dinner is that in general, not just in this situation as a grieving widower, in general you have trouble saying no to women?”

“Yes.”  Hadn’t he already said that?  Not for the first time Salazar seemed a little slow.

“But if your problem is that you can’t say no to a woman, why do you think telling people you don’t want to go out on a date for a year will help?”

“I think the year will help, not my saying it.  I have a friend in AA and he told me that one of their rules for staying sober is to avoid getting into a relationship for the first year of sobriety.  It seems to me I’m in the same position as someone who’s been drinking his entire adult life.  I met Amy when I was nineteen.  I’ve never been an adult male without her.  I should find out who this grown up Hugh is before I try to form a new relationship—especially since at my age I’ll be dating very grown-up women.”

“Very grown-up?” Salazar asked sharply.

“Well . . . at least within five years of my age.”

Salazar cocked his head in surprise.  He had olive skin, still darkened in the first week of October by fearless days under the ozone-thin sun.  “You’re not going to date younger women?”

“Not younger than forty,” Hugh said, conceding another five years.  This didn’t dispel Salazar’s raised, skeptical eyebrows.  Worse, Salazar pressed his lips tight as if struggling not to burst out laughing.  Hugh protested: “I don’t want to have more children.  If I start dating young women, a woman in her thirties for example, and things go well, she’s going to want to have kids and then someone’s heart is going to get broken.”  He had scared off Salazar’s smirk.  “Probably mine,” he added.

Salazar was quiet for a while, considering.  “I think that’s very smart,” he concluded.

“Not dating younger women?  Or not dating for a year?”

“I don’t know about not dating.  What I think makes sense is to avoid getting into a relationship right away.  But let me ask you this, something I’m really curious about: why are you so determined to go through this alone?”

“Alone?”  Hugh was startled by Salazar’s notion of solitude.  “I have Ginnie and Ray, Leslie, and my buddies, Peter and Kyle.  And Karen!” he added hastily, as if worried his list wasn’t long enough.  “My boss Karen Watanabe.  She and her wife Didi are also great friends.”

Salazar nodded impatiently.  “Yes.  But I mean: why are you so determined to go through this without the companionship of a woman?”

“A romantic companionship?” Hugh was irritated.  Hadn’t Salazar been listening?  “I love Amy, I was happy with her, but I never had a chance, ’cause we met so young, to be independent, to be a man on my own.  Shouldn’t I at least use this tragedy to grow, to be a better man?”

Salazar nodded vigorously.  “That’s a great approach.  I agree.  To give yourself a year of independence.”  He was thoughtful and silent for a long moment.  Then he smiled slyly.  “But do you really want to wait that long for . . .”  He lifted his eyebrows suggestively.

“Sex?”

Salazar nodded.

“I wasn’t promising to be celibate,” Hugh informed him.

“That’s what I told the Pope,” Salazar said with a grin.  It vanished suddenly, replaced by an ominous furrowing of brow as he cautioned Hugh: “But you know, it’s very, very hard to keep sex from becoming a relationship.”

“I think I can separate the two.”

This didn’t erase Salazar’s frown.  “Have you ever separated the two?”

“Sure,” Hugh lied.

“And what about her?”

“Her?”

“The woman you’re going to have sex with.  What if she doesn’t separate the two?”

Hugh nodded.  “I see what you mean.”  He took a deep breath and announced, “Okay.  You win.  I won’t have sex.”

1.4

At the Hamilton Foundation for the Arts there were women of all ages, races, and temperaments.  They had always been friendly and respectful to Hugh, but once they observed how he cared for Amy during her illness he was raised onto an altar of pity and admiration that granted him powers equivalent to those of the only nation on earth with a nuclear arsenal.  His slightest whisper was obeyed without question, his desires were preemptively satisfied, and his flaws were transformed into markers of his exceptional character.

Hugh chose not to abuse his gloomy advantage—for the most part.  Although he had vowed years ago he would never demean employees by requiring them to fetch snacks or dry cleaning, he didn’t stop his twenty-seven-year-old assistant Melissa, an anxious, freckle-faced redhead, from routinely buying him a skim latte and cranberry scone for a midmorning pick-me-up.  So Hugh enjoyed his special status a little, but he assumed that after a season of grief passed, his female co-workers’ fierce hugs and brimming eyes, gazing at him as if he were the best and saddest thing they had ever looked on, would diminish and eventually cease altogether.  But nearly five months after he had buried Amy there was no sign that the women at work were removing the pedestal beneath Hugh the Saint.

That was one reason he preferred getting to the office before his co-workers, easy to do since he was unable to sleep past five in the morning.  He’d arrive at six-thirty, relishing his privacy until Melissa came in around nine, depending on the vagaries of riding the G and L subway lines from Greenpoint.  “You come from Greenpoint, go back to Greenpoint,” Hugh silently quoted to himself from On The Waterfront each time his assistant complained about having no hot water and plenty of mice.  After delivering his latte and scone, she would rat on his sleeplessness to his boss.

“Melissa says you had another bad night,” Karen said one morning in early November, poking her head in as she invariably did upon arriving at work from her loft two blocks away. Today she changed the routine by entering and sitting.  This was ominous; Karen had no spare time for idle chit-chat.  She and Didi were raising two children, each the result of Karen’s eggs artificially inseminated with sperm supplied by Didi’s gay brother.  So she was forever rushing between fundraising, administering the Hamilton Foundation, attending parent events at the children’s elementary school, and reassuring stay-at-home Didi that she wasn’t the lesbian equivalent of a taken-for-granted wife.  “You need drugs,” Karen informed Hugh.  “Ambien, melatonin at least.  You—need—to—sleep.”  Her squared-off body, round face, and dark eyes that always seemed narrowed in irritation, transformed her in Hugh’s imagination—latently racist from repeated viewings of The Bridge Over the River Kwai—into a fearsome interrogator.

“I’m getting enough sleep,” he lied.

Without looking at him, Karen pressed something on her Blackberry, permanently glued to the palm of her right hand.  She raised it to her ear while telling Hugh: “You’re going to my doctor.  Only take ten minutes.  He knows all about the new sleep drugs.  He’ll find you one that won’t give you a hangover.”  She informed someone who she was and that she wanted Dr. Greenstein to see a friend today, then insisted, “Yes, you have to squeeze him in.”  A moment later, she hung up and announced he had an appointment for two-fifteen.

“I’m screening the Wallinski film at two,” Hugh objected.

“You’re moving the screening to tomorrow and seeing Dr. Greenstein,” Karen told him.  “And if I have to stop by your apartment after I go to tonight’s nightmare dinner party at FF’s to force feed you a sleeping pill, I will.”  She stood up, hands and Blackberry on her hips, managing at five-foot-two to glare down at him.

Here we go, Hugh decided.  He took a deep breath:  “No,” he said.

“What?” Karen snapped, as if she had misheard.

Hugh swallowed and said: “I don’t want to see your doctor.”

Shortly after four in the afternoon, having filled the prescription Dr. Greenstein had handed him, Hugh returned to the office a defeated man.  Melissa pointed to Watanabe’s door as soon as he stepped off the elevator.  He walked into Karen’s paperwork jungle waving a pill bottle of surrender.

“What did he give you?” Karen demanded.

“Ambien.”

“Just Ambien?  Why did it take so long?” Karen was bent over a towering stack of folders rising from the carpet.  Hugh knew from prior bitching they were the annual staff evaluation reports she was required to complete before Thanksgiving.  She groaned and picked up the top one.  “You’ve been gone forever.”

“Greenstein found out I hadn’t had a check up in a while so he gave me the Full Monty.”

“A while?” Karen was appalled.  “When the hell was your last check up?”

“Six years ago.  Amy and I were in too many doctor’s offices for me to volunteer for more.  Anyway, I’m fine,” he added in response to her disapproving frown.

“Excuse me,” Melissa said, as she appeared in the doorway, in an energetic and anxious rush as always when on the subject of Hugh’s schedule. “Hugh, if you want they’ll run the Wallinski at five.  It runs two-ten.  Should I grab you a snack?  There’s a new sushi place round the corner.  Could get you a tuna and California roll.  Miso soup would be nice too, right?  Chilly today.”

“He can’t see the Wallinski at five,” Karen told her, then turned back to Hugh: “I need you to be my date at FF’s tonight.  Didi has another of her migraines.  FF insisted I bring you so she’s not stuck with an empty chair.”

Hugh wondered whether, if he took an Ambien immediately, he could sleep through the rest of his day.  He said, “I really should see the Wallinski today if we’re serious about opening the festival with it.”

“We’re not,” Karen said.  “We need to premiere a big studio movie, an Oscar contender.  The board is on my back about our ‘relevance.’ That we’ve got to compete with Tribeca and the New York Film Festival.”

Melissa stepped into Karen’s office, joining the conversation: “Should we be allowing money to influence our artistic choices?”

Karen narrowed her eyes at Melissa, taking aim.  Hugh stepped between them.  Melissa was five years older than Ginnie, yet Hugh felt she was young enough to require protection.  “Do I need suit and tie for Francine’s dinner?” he asked Karen.

She leaned around him and said to Melissa: “You can go.  And from now on knock before you enter my office.”

Hugh didn’t have to look at Melissa to know her reaction; her stubborn response was sufficient: “So Hugh—do you want me to cancel the Wallinski?”  He nodded without turning.  He feared that if he saw the hurt and fury on her freckled face he might have an uncontrollable impulse to buy her the latest American Girl doll.  “Should I close the door?” Melissa asked, voice receding.

“Yes, please,” Karen hissed.  Once it clicked shut, she said, “You should fire her.”

Hugh wanted to say no.   He settled for “Why?”

Karen made a face as if this was infuriatingly obvious:  “She’s your assistant and she walks all over you.”  She waited for a response, then shrugged and waved the subject away.  “Go home and take a nap.  We’re due at seven but FF never serves before eight-thirty.  We’ll be lucky to get out of there by midnight.”

He left immediately, relieved she wasn’t going to press him to fire Melissa, who, he had to admit, did tend to share her many opinions inappropriately.  Hugh also admitted to himself, and not for the first time, that while in theory he was the only nation in his office with a nuclear arsenal, in practice he was a pitiful helpless giant.

1.5

“I’m living my mother’s dream,” Karen said as Francine Bishop led the two of them into her mansion on 81st Street off Fifth Avenue. “Hugh is the man Mom wanted me to marry: a tennis playing WASP who’d turn her Kyoto cousins green with envy.”  She squeezed his arm and winked at him flirtatiously.  Hugh had accompanied Karen to cocktail parties, openings, after-screening dinners, but they had gone together as a professional duo with different contingents to talk to—she wealthy donors, he grungy filmmakers.  Tonight, thanks to his widower status, his sole function was to be her escort.   It occurred to Hugh that this new role didn’t bode well for his social life; and the coquettish look, given her sexual preference for women, was simply weird.

“You play tennis?” Francine asked.  “I’m obsessed with tennis.” Although in her mid-seventies she looked fit and toned in her clingy, black silk dress, and her skin gleamed like a baby’s.  It was as wrinkle-free, too—hence Karen’s cruel nickname of FF, short for Facelift Francy.

“So is Hugh,” Karen said.  “He plays every chance he gets.  Maybe you guys should partner up.”

While a solemn young man silently took their coats, Francine asked Hugh where he played.  He answered, “Your home is amazing,” overwhelmed that they had stepped into another time, and into astonishing wealth: a five-story city mansion, double the width of a typical townhouse, the interior meticulously preserved, or more likely carefully restored to its turn-of-the-century appointments.  “This is fantastic, exquisite,” he gushed, eyes roaming over elaborate moldings, marble fireplace, and a sweeping semi-circular staircase with an ebony bannister.  It looked like the set for Scorsese’s disappointing Age of Innocence.

Francine detailed her home’s provenance while leading them up to the second floor.  Built by a railroad tycoon in 1894, the ten-thousand-square-foot mansion had been inherited by a dissipated son who had to surrender it following the ’29 crash, after which it passed through four international financiers, briefly served as a discreet sanatorium for the very wealthy and mildly insane, and was bought by Francine and her late husband in 1979.

Ushering them into the main parlor, she explained that four years earlier she had redone the house down to its bones.  Hugh spied a Tiffany chandelier, its glass glowing from the reflection of a roaring fire.  The air was redolent of pine and birch, comforting on the raw November night.  He decided the look was older than he’d first thought.  This was mid-nineteenth-century:  Olivia de Havilland’s drawing room in The Heiress.

As it turned out Francine’s decorator was there.  Brian Mahoney appreciated Hugh’s movie references.  “A film-set look is what I was going for,” he said snaring one of the mini crab cakes that were being offered on silver trays by the same solemn young man and a smiling young woman, both in black slacks and white shirts.  “I wanted to satisfy Francy’s vision of restoring the house to an original look while adding enough self-consciousness to make it sing.  So I pretended I was being asked to design a period film, a stage for the incredible Francy.”  He blew a kiss to their hostess across the room.

She was standing near the crackling fireplace, talking with a dour elderly couple whose soft-spoken paleness reminded Hugh of his paternal grandparents, while by the floor-to-ceiling windows, Karen monopolized a voluptuous young woman who looked as if she had been poured into her shimmering blue dress.  Hugh was glad they were across the room.  Even at that remove, his eyes were magnetized by Blue Dress’s cleavage.

The safety of his somewhat male conversation with Brian was undone by Karen’s leading the young woman over.  En route Karen made no effort to avoid staring at the creamy display beside her, a leering surveillance that she could indulge more discreetly than if Hugh had attempted it because her eyes were level with the young woman’s scoop neckline whereas heels had raised Blue Dress, naturally tall anyway, to his height.  Karen introduced her to Hugh as Hilda Stapleton.  Karen immediately explained that Hilda had returned to graduate school to study film at NYU after working for fifteen years in investment banking.

“Hugh teaches a course at Tisch every semester.” Karen lifted her pencil thin eyebrows suggestively and added, “Maybe he can give you an A or two.”

Luckily Hilda ignored this inappropriate remark.  She earnestly asked Hugh, without any preamble, what he thought of the Dogme 95 Movement, referring to the Danish filmmakers who insisted on strict here-and-now realism, no special lighting, no filtered lens, no soundtrack, no music cues, no genre stories, no period pieces, nothing artificial.  She explained she had just seen Open Hearts and The Celebration and thought them “devastating, revolutionary.”

Hugh gave his usual politic answer—“I like most of the Dogme films, but not all of their dogma”—while keeping his eyes focused on her forehead.

Meanwhile three other guests arrived.  Hugh was introduced to a young couple, whose robust blondness balanced the pale elderly duo already present, and to a seventyish man named Gus, who broke the dress code in a black cashmere sweater and ironed jeans.  He appeared to be cast in the role of Francine’s date—or at least a special friend.

So long as Hilda remained in Hugh’s field of vision everyone else faded into the emerald-green wallpaper.  He couldn’t stop himself from looking at her, or think about anything other than what it would be like to kiss a woman almost his height.  The prospect was so exciting he glanced around guiltily to see whether his wife had noticed his lust.  Then he remembered that Amy was dead.  This sort of eerie sensation, that Amy was about to walk in, or an impulse to rush home to tell her about a hilarious or horrifying event that had just occurred, ended each time with a fresh stab of loss.  This new twist, Amy as jealous wife, wasn’t an improvement.  After Hugh remembered that Amy wasn’t there to scold him, he continued to wish she was present to be irritated or, more likely, inspired to wry sarcasm by his wandering eye.

Worse than Hugh’s mental confusion was that, after gazing at Hilda’s wide-set light-blue eyes, straight white-blonde hair, mountainous bosom, and—when she turned to go into dinner—her rounded ass, firm thighs and well-defined calves, he misjudged distances like a pubescent boy after a growth spurt.  Failing to clear a one-inch-high doorsill in the central hall, he stumbled into the dining room and upended a silk fire screen.

“And Karen told me you’re a sure-footed athlete,” Francine teased as she took his elbow, directing him to sit on her right.  He was flattered to be granted this place of honor yet disappointed to discover it put him far from Hilda.  Gus and his gloomy face got a seat next to the view.  Like Karen, Gus openly admired the fjord formed by Hilda’s breasts.  He was so impressed that he interrupted Francine raving about the Met’s current Van Gogh exhibit to inform the group that Hilda looked like “the spitting image of Marilyn Monroe.”

“Don’t be an ass,” Francine murmured, wasting no energy on her insult. “You’re embarrassing Hildy.  And she looks so lovely tonight.  Not cheesecake at all.”

“I didn’t say a goddamn thing about cheesecake,” Gus growled.

“Gussie is right, darling,” Brian exclaimed.  “I never thought of it before.  Hildy does look like Marilyn!  What do you say, Hugh?  You’re the film expert.”

Other than her figure, she did not resemble Monroe.  She was nearer to Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. To Hugh’s taste Vitti was a more refined and beautiful woman; her hooded blue eyes were disillusioned rather than Marilyn-desperate, her pouty lips sly not wanton, witty not forlorn. Was Hilda’s resemblance to the exquisite Vitti the explanation for his befuddlement?  Actually, her generous figure wasn’t his type; Hugh had never been attracted to large breasted women, or tall woman, or women of many curves.  Amy had been five-five, nearly flat chested and small boned.  Her abundant auburn hair was the biggest thing about her, and she didn’t blow it out, often suppressing it altogether in a ponytail.  But why be ashamed that he was turned on by Hilda’s robustness?  When he was thirteen he had enjoyed Playboy centerfolds.  As an adult he sometimes managed to tolerate otherwise dull museum exhibitions by lingering at a Rubens.

“Well, Hugh, I think you’ve studied Hilda long enough to form an opinion,” Francine said dryly.  “What’s your verdict?”

“She’s beautiful, of course,” Hugh mumbled.  “But Marilyn had a very different shape to her face . . .” His throat closed, his cheeks warmed. He remembered this childish reaction when he was thirteen—stammering to a teasing friend that he wasn’t impressed by a girl’s beauty while it rendered him speechless.

“You cruel, cruel man,” Brian said. “Well my dear, I think you’re much more beautiful than Marilyn.”

“Oh she is!  You are,” Hugh cried out, mortified, his right hand reaching across the table as if to retrieve his insult.  He knocked over his crystal water glass, which landed unbroken but with a heavy thud.  Someone gasped, and Hugh stood, hurrying to right it.  Too late.  The contents were already soaking into the tablecloth.

“It’s only water.” Francine was impatient.  “Sit, Hugh.  Leave it.  It’s nothing.”

“I was going to say you look like Monica Vitti,” Hugh pleaded to Hilda.

She stared uncomprehendingly, but Brian whistled.  “Monica Vitti!  Much classier.  I like it.”

After that Hugh kept his head down for the remainder of the meal.  When he raised his eyes it was to fasten them on his handsome hostess, ignoring the young woman on his right, who was attractive in the refined small-boned tradition of Grace Kelly, an equally unsettling vista.  He preferred to stay out of trouble by limiting himself to admiring Francine Bishop’s high regal brow, pale blue eyes, aquiline nose, jutting jaw, and wrinkle-free skin.

He managed to evade Francine’s sympathetic questions about Amy’s passing, turning the conversation to her love of tennis until Karen barged in with an encomium of how well he had cared for Amy during her illness.  Hugh tried to interrupt, attempting to launch two new topics, but twice was leashed back to questions about his goodness from Francine and the Grace Kelly look-a-like, and finally by Hilda, who abandoned talking with Gus to join the Caregiver Hugh Fan Club and elicited even more details from Karen.

During this crucible of praise he restlessly sipped from his wine glass, steadily refilled by the wait-staff pair until he heard his tongue slipping on the few words he managed to get out.  He shifted to Evian, downing five glasses.  Well before his decaf espresso was served, he had to excuse himself to urinate.

“Let me show you the way,” Francine said, “and I’ll check on what they’ve done with my mint tea.”  She guided him to another masterpiece of a nineteenth-century room, this one draped and upholstered in burgundy fabrics.

She paused before an unusually tall church door.  “Here’s the loo,” she said, then added, “I’m so sorry, Hugh, so terribly sorry for your loss.” She squeezed his forearm and added softly, “You’re a good man,” before leaving him alone to relieve himself.

“They love me because of you, Amy,” Hugh slurred to his penis during a very long emptying of his bladder in the dark wood bathroom.  Peter’s miserable phrase came back to him, “Hugh stuck around for the cancer,” and he caught himself wondering (what a horny cad he was turning out to be) whether Hilda-with-the-Blue-Dress-On was duly impressed.

1.6

At 10:40 Karen Watanabe’s Blackberry buzzed and she became the first to announce that she had to leave Francine’s nineteenth century.  “Just got a text from Didi that our legally unrecognized marriage is over unless I’m home in fifteen” was her exit line.

“And it’s a half-hour cab ride,” Hugh said, getting a bigger laugh from the group than he had expected.  He, Hilda, and the dour older couple joined Karen in departing. On the street, the couple delivered a real-estate surprise by announcing they lived in Tribeca, and who else was going downtown?

“I’m all the way west,” Karen said.  “Better get my own cab.  But you’re going my way—right, Hilda?”

Hilda considered Karen’s invitation.  She was a solemn woman—early- to mid-thirties, Hugh guessed—movements languorous, wistful look in her eye, regretful cast to her lips.  Amy had been a physically perky girl, even on chemo: quick to smile, always on the balls of her feet, eager to get to her next activity although it might be nothing more strenuous than taking a nap.  Hugh again had the odd sensation of disloyalty to Amy for his fascination with so different a woman.  Hilda finally answered Karen: “I’m on Fifth and Twentieth.  Not west.”

Karen had flagged a cab.  She got in, leaving the door agape.  “I can drop you,” she insisted.

“We can drop you,” said the husband.  He glanced at his better half, adding argumentatively, “It’s a straight shot for us.”

“Not really,” his wife mumbled.

“Which way are you heading?” Hilda asked Hugh.  He didn’t answer immediately, preoccupied by noticing that Karen was so eager to drop Hilda at Fifth and 20th that she had neglected to offer Hugh a ride down to 12th off Fifth, equally on her way.

“Hugh’s practically your neighbor!” Karen said. “Both of you get in,” she ordered as she slid to the far end and patted the middle seat for Hilda.

Thus Hugh, to his nervous excitement, was squeezed flush against Hilda’s left flank, although he didn’t feel anything more thrilling than pressure from her camel hair greatcoat.  Karen babbled all the way downtown.  When they passed the Flatiron building she fired a random question across Hilda’s lap at Hugh: “Francine is such an elegant and handsome woman—right, Hugh?  And she looks so young.”

“With a scalpel’s help,” Hilda said.

“But you can’t tell it’s surgery,” Karen said disingenuously. “I was serious about you playing tennis with Francy, Hugh.  She’s terrific.  Right, Hilda?”

“After they got married, she used to beat my dad regularly.  Drove him crazy.”

“Your dad?” Hugh was surprised.  “She was married to your dad?”

“Yeah, she’s my stepmother.  She kept her maiden name.  Francine was an early feminist.  When I was eight she told me never give up mine.”

“She’s awesome,” Karen said, then leaned forward to instruct the driver to stop at 20th.  “Okay if you guys get out here?  Great to finally meet you,” she said, twisting to face Hilda and kissing her full on the mouth, lingering.  Hilda had to jerk her head back to end it.   “Mmm,” Karen said, then ordered Hugh: “Don’t you dare come in before noon.  And take your Ambien.”

On the sidewalk, silenced by the vacuum left by Karen’s departure, they watched her taxi drive off.  They stood side by side until it turned a corner and disappeared.

“You can’t sleep?” Hilda asked finally.

“I sleep fine.”

“Are you tired now?” She spoke so earnestly Hugh perceived no motive but concern.

“No.  Not tired.”  In fact, he was a little woozy on his feet.  Since Amy’s diagnosis five years ago he’d been diligent about stopping at one glass of red wine—until tonight.  The years off seemed to have cost him his birthright capacity: Grandpa Reynolds had downed nearly a fifth of bourbon every day of his ninety-two years with no sign of inebriation other than a loud exhale and the murmured phrase “It’s a bad world.”

Hilda nodded at the double-height windows of her building. The spanking new lobby glistened with white marble and polished gold fixtures. Whenever Hugh had passed by during the previous year’s gut renovation he had wondered who could afford the posted prices for its new condos.  “Want to come up for a night cap?  Or tea?  I have brownies.”  She began a smile but it expired before being fully born.  “I love brownies,” she said glumly.  “Better than Ambien.”

It might not seem surprising that an attractive young woman, recently enrolled in film school, would invite up to her apartment an eligible man responsible for programming a prestigious film festival as well as chairing a scholarship committee responsible for doling out grants to independent moviemakers—yet Hugh hadn’t seen it coming.  Not because he was naïve about the fuzzy border between romance and opportunism or uninformed as to the attractions of what his friend Peter had called his CV.  It was that this muscle—is she interested?—had atrophied decades ago.  In addition, he’d been precluded from anticipating such a turn of events by being the father of a daughter.  Hilda didn’t seem much older than Hugh’s baby girl.

At last he understood his evening-long compulsively averting eyes:  it wasn’t a widower’s guilt but the reflex of being a daddy.  Once Amy had whispered to him about the early maturing effects of antibiotic-laden chickens on their confused eleven-year-old daughter, Hugh had made sure to look away from young female flesh.  That was required often because Ginnie tended to forget that her door, if not locked, gaped open; and there was her habit of commuting to and from a shared-with-her-brother hallway bathroom in a robe not tightly tied.  He had never felt self-conscious hugging Ginnie, or when she snuggled with him while watching TV, or when she took his arm and leaned against him while they walked Manhattan streets, but when she dressed up to impress a young man he made certain that his eyes didn’t ski down her scoop neckline. And once his apartment became a gathering place for her friends he committed an entire generation to a no-leering zone.

“I guess not,” Hilda said in reaction to his flummoxed silence.

“Yes, I would!” he said.  “Not a brownie.  I’m stuffed.  But tea.  I’d love a cup of tea.”

And thus Hugh, who had vowed not to go on a date for a year after his wife’s death, not even five months post-funeral found himself after midnight in a buxom young woman’s apartment.

1.7

Hugh pretended to admire Hilda’s condo, although he was shocked by how tiny it was.  A complete tour consisted of standing in the center of her combined living and dining area and looking in one direction through an open doorway into a bedroom hardly larger than its queen-size mattress and in the other at a closet-sized galley kitchen.  He was flabbergasted that this nine-hundred-square-foot box was what eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars bought in the once-despised Flatiron neighborhood.  With whose money had Hilda purchased this rip-off?  Perhaps the apartment represented her farewell bonus when she quit investment banking for film school.  Of course her deceased father must have left her something and her stepmother had plenty of money.  Then why this lower floor one-bedroom?  Why not the three-bedroom penthouse?

Hugh settled on a white leather loveseat with a cup of mint tea while Hilda delivered a fifteen-minute monologue about her change of direction from investment banking to film school.  Hugh’s anxieties about the forever-escalating prices of Manhattan real estate—he feared that the rent on his soon to be de-stabilized apartment would rise to unaffordable heights and force him to move to Kansas, or at least Brooklyn—distracted him, but he was able to keep track of Hilda’s story anyway because she had a habit of repeating key phrases.  “Everyone bitches about the long hours in IB, the crushing paperwork, but I liked the twenty-four-seven of it.”  Pause.  “I loved the twenty-four-seven.  I wanted to hide by working my ass off.”  Full stop.  “Wanted to avoid everything in life except work.  The work didn’t get to me.  What bothered me was the only reason we were all working night and day was to make money.”  A long, thoughtful beat.  “To make as much money as possible.  That’s it.”  She sipped from a glass of white wine she had poured for herself.  “That’s all they live for.  More.  Make more money.”  She shook her head in disgust.

Hugh gently objected, “When you went into investment banking, didn’t you expect it would be about making money?”

“No!”

“But it’s banking.  Other than money what could it be about?”

“Help start businesses!  Facilitating innovation!” Hilda seemed astonished he didn’t know about this beneficent aspect of high finance.  “Investment banking is the life’s blood of capitalism.  Poison it and the body dies, that’s what Jerrold used to say, and I guess I wanted to believe what my father taught me.”  Pause.  Stare into middle-distance.  “I needed to believe what my father had taught me.”

“Jerrold was your father?” Hugh asked.

A half-hearted smile appeared and immediately expired.  “You don’t know who my father was?  Really?  You don’t know about my father?”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.  It’s wonderful.”  She looked grim.  She took a long sip of her wine, lifting her chin, exposing a long smooth neck.  She was too young, too tempting.  After he finished his mint tea, what the hell was he intending to do with this fatherless child?  “Jerrold Stapleton founded Stapleton, Tyler, Arthur and Rausch,” Hilda explained.  “STAR Bank?” she prompted.  “You’ve heard of STAR, right?  The leading investment bank in the world?  It’s number one.”

“Sure, of course,” Hugh said to confirm that he didn’t reside in a cave.  “But I’ve only heard the acronym. I guess it never occurred to me that actual living people had founded it.  In fact, isn’t STAR one of the Hamilton Foundation’s largest patrons?”

“No, STAR isn’t a patron,” Hilda said gently.  Another attempt at a smile withered before it could blossom.  “But it manages the Foundation’s endowment.  And my stepmother is one of your biggest donors.  Francine is a BIG donor.  That’s why you were at dinner tonight.  I mean, that’s why Karen was invited.  Francine loves her.  Really loves her . . .  Not that way!” she added abruptly. “Did you see how she tongue-kissed me in the cab!”

“She . . . she did?”

“She stuck her tongue all the way into my mouth!  Yuck.  I mean, Jesus, if a guy I just met did that I’d bite it off.  Right off. I’m sorry.  She’s your friend.  But I got my fill of groping lesbians at Wesleyan.  Then I got my fill of groping men at M&G.”

Reeling from the detail about Karen—he liked Didi a lot and immediately worried about the future of their coupledom—Hugh mumbled, “M&G?” to change the subject.

“Sorry.  Keep forgetting you’re not a fundraiser like Karen.  You don’t keep score about who has money in this town.  McClaine and Greenstein.  Boutique investment bank.  Boutique but big enough.”

“You worked there?  Not at STAR?”

“At STAR?  No way.  Nothing I accomplished at my father’s firm would be taken seriously.  What I didn’t know was that I couldn’t escape Dad anywhere in IB.  His ghost is everywhere. They’re obsessed with him.  It’s weird.  They’re supposed to be numbers guys, cold bastards, but they worship my dad’s legend like he’s King Arthur or something.  More like Batman.  I don’t know.”  She paused to think that claim through, then:  “A superhero.  Definitely.  Superman of finance.  I couldn’t get credit for anything.”

“So you felt hopelessly overshadowed by your father’s reputation in investment banking,” Hugh said, repeating back what he thought was the gist of her speech.

“No!” she protested, cheeks flushing pink, a pretty sight.  “I didn’t give a shit about my father’s reputation.  Everybody else did.  Not me.  I wasn’t competitive with my father.”

Hugh didn’t believe her.  He thought the reverse must be true and also thought no less of her.  Why shouldn’t she want to best Jerrold?  Why shouldn’t daughters, like sons, wish to surpass their fathers?  Ginnie loved Hugh but was delighted whenever she could correct what she dubbed his “literalness” in deciphering Herzog or appreciating Tarantino.

“I didn’t mean you were competitive with him,” Hugh fibbed.  “I meant they couldn’t see you, the real you.  That’s very frustrating.  My daughter enrolled in a film course her senior year, was doing great, thoroughly enjoying the class, and then one of the kids mentioned my job to the professor, and he began bugging Ginnie about it, always assuming her insights had come from me, or that she had seen everything when she was a kid thanks to me, not out of her own curiosity and initiative.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Ginnie’s way smarter than me about movies, has seen all sorts of things on her own . . .” He noticed Hilda staring at him open-mouthed.  Had he offended her by seeming to compare her great father’s fame to his little job?  On reflection it was absurd that he had.  He tried to make amends: “No comparison, of course.  But it spoiled the course for her.”

“What does Ginnie do?”  Hilda leaned forward, her scoop neckline billowing.  Hugh saw more than ever of her black bra and its creamy filling.

He looked away.  “She’s, uh . . .” His cheeks warmed.  He was shamed out of what he was going to say by his awareness that he was speaking about his daughter while picturing kissing Hilda.  He shouldn’t be talking about Ginnie in this circumstance.  In fact, it wasn’t proper for him to be in this setting at all.  “She blogs about DC, restaurants, new galleries, happenings in the reviving inner city.   Sort of like a critic but also a kind of living guide book really . . .” He checked his watch.  “Oh my God.  It’s almost one.”  He stood up.

“You’re going?” Hilda stood as well, blocking his exit.  She exaggerated a pout of disappointment.

“I really should be in bed,” Hugh blurted.  On the phrase in bed he met Hilda’s big pale-blue eyes.  He blinked, then stared.

“We should both be in bed,” Hilda said, and for the first time that evening she succeeded in completing a smile.

The Kiss

Hugh kissed her.

He had not kissed a woman other than Amy, excluding hello and goodbye pecks, since he was nineteen years old.  He utterly believed this accounting of monogamous smooching to be gospel, although one drunken night at the Sundance Film Festival seventeen years ago he had experienced an unfulfilling nine minutes and twelve seconds of sexual intercourse with a film critic from an LA giveaway newspaper.  Long ago, self-disgusted and guilty, Hugh had scratched out this adulterous mark from his morality ledger with such violence that he no longer remembered the original blot.  The nearly ten-minute fumbling on a lumpy Hilton mattress was as thoroughly repressed as if he were a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.  And there was a rough similarity between combat and Hugh’s encounter at the Sundance Film Festival.  Some men of his generation had fought in the tragic mistake of Vietnam; he had watched three independent black-and-white films on 16- millimeter in a row, followed by two martinis.  Shit happens.

So this kissing of Hilda, what he thought of as his first contact with strange flesh in over thirty years, was a bold adventure, a trespass that had an overpowering effect.  The slight parting of her moist lips, a taste of wine and something fresher and younger than himself, shut out sight and hearing as their mouths met, opened, sealed, widening with each additional contact, until he was falling into her taste and texture.  He felt on the verge of losing time and place forever when a rebuke interrupted: You are kissing a woman who is not Amy.  He jerked away.

“What?” Hilda asked.  Her eyes were glazed.

“I never kissed a woman before,” he said in perfect seriousness.  Amy wasn’t a woman he had kissed, she was his other self, as easy as drawing a breath.

Hilda blinked, stared; then a doubtful smile appeared.  “Never?”

“I never kissed anyone but Amy,” he said, which was wildly inaccurate and exactly true.

The effect of this chaste testimony on Hilda was stunning.  It overwhelmed the need for further action on Hugh’s part.  To prevent becoming entwined with her in her bed he would have had to push her away, re-button his shirt, slap hands off his belt.  Besides, Hugh did not want to be separated from her ocean-kissed mouth.  She tasted like the Hawaiian surf, tipsy Hugh believed, although he had never been near Oahu’s waters.  He was grateful to be submerged in the warm embracing sea.

He remembered this thrill from years ago with Amy, intense excitement as the border between foreign bodies is breached, a reckless yearning to be united with the other.  Once they were in bed he was surprised and delighted by the many novelties.  He was harder than he had been in a long time.  Hilda’s skin was smooth and firm in ways no one past forty could expect to be, and there were intimate discoveries when he roved below: absence of hair, a heady perfume, a sweet and pungent taste.  When their bodies united—her long, soft flesh arching against him—their choreography had an utterly different rhythm that somehow felt familiar.  Everything about their lovemaking was a pleasure, but that initial kiss above all—her different height, her lip’s fullness, sipping her essence—was deeply gratifying.  To his astonishment he preferred the kiss’s subtler and lingering pleasures to the sneezing violence of orgasm.  Most striking of all, while they kissed he had a thrilling and shameful feeling he had not known in those deathless days of youth: his gratification was thoroughly selfish.  Hugh enjoyed an undiluted satisfaction out of being alive that he felt he didn’t deserve.

Later, while walking home alone, enjoying a loose-limbed stroll through the city’s bright, deserted three-in-the-morning streets, he wondered at the paradox: how could it be that his profound enjoyment was not diminished by the accompanying sadness he felt at knowing that to kiss and to be kissed, and all other earthly delights, had been taken away forever from the woman he loved?

1.8

Francine Bishop was next to seduce Hugh.  She accomplished this platonically with two hours of free indoor tennis.  As soon as he arrived at the office on the morning after bedding Hilda—at 11:00, unconscionably late—Karen popped her head in. “Told you Ambien would do the trick,” she chortled.  “Drugs.  I love ’em.  And look at you.  You’re so relaxed, the most rested I’ve seen you since . . .”  She waved away the dark past.  “So do it every night.  Promise?”

“I promise I’ll do what I did last night every chance I get,” Hugh said.

“Now that you’re here, you have to go.  Get your tennis gear and your butt over to the Midtown Courts.  That’s where you usually play, right?  So does FF!  She just called, desperate for your number because her doubles partner woke up with a102 fever.  I accepted for you because I need you to say yes.  I figured you’d say yes anyway because it’s her treat, court’s already paid for.”  Karen clapped.  “So hustle up.  You’re on from noon to two.”

Hugh murmured he shouldn’t play hooky given that he’d come in late, but his demurral was profoundly insincere.  He couldn’t afford to turn down two free hours of tennis, a pastime he loved above all others.  He needed to be careful about money, especially now, after Amy’s death.  His salary covered to the chin his cheap, soon-to-expire twenty-four-hundred a month rent and Brown’s gouge of tuition; Amy’s free-lance editing used to pay the rest: groceries, clothing, vacations, medical deductibles.  He was spending down his thirty-eight thousand dollars of savings at a rate that would drain it in two years.  His hope was that when Ray’s college days were over he’d get back to black.  Until then, two free hours of tennis, albeit mixed doubles and in a group probably below his level, was Christmas come early.  And there was the bonus of his boss giving him permission to skip the dreary Wednesday meeting, which invariably consisted of Karen scolding, staff whining and Hugh ameliorating.

He hurried out and didn’t come up short from his delight until he entered the Midtown Tennis Club, where the ramifications of partnering with the stepmother of a woman he had made love to last night struck him.  (And what were the ramifications of last night?  When he got around to calling Hilda he wasn’t sure how to manage his contradictory message: he wanted to thank her for the profound pleasure he had obtained from her company and somehow let her know that it would never happen again.)  While Hugh shed corduroy trousers and blue work shirt, exchanging them for frayed white shorts and yellowed white tee, it struck him that Francine might have an angry reaction if she learned that he had been a guest in her stepdaughter’s bed, which would then have unpleasant consequences for Karen vis-à-vis the Foundation’s funding, and of course for Hugh.

As he double-tied his New Balance laces, what had so far been a morning of pleasurable flashbacks to last night with Hilda turned to dread.  How could he have put at risk not merely his job, programming of the film festival and helping young movie-makers with grants, but the Foundation’s funding in general?  Other than his children—and the film program was his child too—his work, work he cherished, was all he had left.  If it suffered because of his sexual indiscretion he could never forgive himself.

Ready to leave the gender safety of the men’s locker room he remembered what Leslie, in one of their tearful post-funeral dinners, had told him about her last conversation with Amy.  “I’m not worried about Ginnie or Ray,” Amy had said.  “They have Hugh to mother-hen them.  But Hughie—who’ll watch over him?” Amy’s best friend and her bereaved husband had agreed how sweet and loving it was of Amy as she was losing her life to worry about rather than resent Hugh’s surviving her.  “I told her I’d keep an eye on you,” Leslie said with a wink, and he nodded, both of them sure that he would eventually overcome his grief and move on.  Now Hugh knew that Amy had been right in a way he hadn’t understood.  She wasn’t thinking of his despair at losing her, she was worried about her boy being off the leash, running wild in traffic, and she was so right.  His very first kiss without her had been an unmitigated catastrophe.

“There he is!” Francine announced as he emerged, befuddled and tongue-tied.  He couldn’t blurt out, I slept with your stepdaughter but don’t take away our funding!  Yet he was anxious to say something, at least hint at what had occurred, convinced it would go worse for him if Francine learned of it first from Hilda.  Unfortunately he wasn’t alone with her.  She said, “You’re a dear to play with us hackers,” and immediately turned to introduce a stocky woman, dressed, as was Francine, in designer tennis togs emblazoned with Nike swooshes.  Beside them, in pristine Roger Federer signature navy blue, was a man with a flowing mane of straw-colored hair who looked, at most, twenty years old.  “This is my dear friend Sara Bingham and her nephew Toby.”

Hugh, for the most part, was a contented, even-tempered man.  He didn’t possess the murderous ambition typical of New Yorkers, didn’t mind that he made less money than everyone he knew, didn’t resent that he had no luxury car, no house in the Hamptons, no swollen IRA, or that he didn’t possess that male Manhattan must—the latest electronic gadget.  Outside of purchasing his high-definition television, he was indifferent to 2005 tech: iPods, Blackberries, and the latest rage, WiFi laptops.  Hugh did watch the Giants every Sunday, the Mets, some playoff basketball, but not with the argumentative, histrionic ferocity of his male friends, crushed if their heroes lost, obnoxious in victory.  There was one location, however, where Hugh’s calm self turned testosterone homicidal: on the tennis court.  He needed to beat whomever he opposed.  And he utterly loathed losing.  So when Francine announced he was “stuck with her,” the two of them playing against stocky Sara and lithe Toby, all considerations vanished other than the provocation of playing against a twenty-year-old male.

The mixed pairs faced off by gender to warm up. Toby’s strokes surprised Hugh.  Young men usually swung as hard as they could, ignoring how many balls flew out of court.  Not Toby.  He had gentle strokes, his fleet feet helping him to return everything.  He patiently waited for an aggressive opponent’s error, or the opportunity to hit a strategic lob, a drop shot, something off-speed to frustrate a hard-hitting foe.  In other words he played like a crafty old man, the way Hugh was supposed to.

At first this incensed Hugh, sure that Toby was condescending to him.  To bestir the young man to hit the ball normally Hugh swung even harder and finally came to net as part of their warm up rally, deliberately slamming the ball right at the young man.  But Toby wasn’t patronizing Hugh.  His game was as cautiously defensive as Hugh’s was fiercely aggressive.  This discovery didn’t calm Hugh.  The possibility of losing to a prematurely aged boy inflamed him into an anxious rage.

Sara twirled her racquet and Francine correctly guessed—Up.  She said, “You serve first for our team, Hugh.  With my shoulder I’ll be lucky to get one in.”

Hugh’s serve was his pride and joy, his weapon, his touchtone.  His best were too hard for most hackers to return.  Even his gentler, more reliable offerings, when properly placed, often didn’t come back.  “First ball in,” Hugh called to Sara and Toby, not wanting to show off his stuff by practicing and thus give them a chance to gauge and prepare for his power.  Tennis Hugh was ruthless.

“That’s too good,” was Sara’s reaction as he cleanly aced her down the middle to begin the match.

As Francine crossed to take her net position for his next serve she looked back to flash Hugh a gleeful grin of appreciation.

Hugh didn’t aim for the lines against the young lion.  He smashed the ball at his body.  Rather than attempt a swing Toby had to awkwardly use his racquet as a shield to protect his privates.  Although Hugh’s back soon tightened, his legs got rubbery, and he had to ease up on his serves, he didn’t soften his hard ground strokes or penetrating volleys.  He and Francine won the first set six games to one.  As they shook hands before marching to the net to thank the losers, Francine said in a low voice full of breathless ardor, “From now on you’re my partner forever and ever.”

1.9

“You whipped them!” Karen said when Hugh arrived back at the office.  “You kicked their ass!  FF wants you to play every week.”  She bounced up and down.  For a stout girl she was surprisingly nimble in her glee, finishing with a 360-degree twirl.  “Our funding . . .” Her right arm shot up to the ceiling to indicate where Hugh’s hard serve would send it.

He kept quiet while Karen explained that she knew about his triumph because Francine had called to apologize for skipping out without thanking him properly and gone on to promise she would call back to make sure he was available next week.   “I told her you could have every Wednesday staff meeting off, so don’t you dare tell her you can’t play!”

Begging that he had work to catch up on, he shooed his boss out, shut his door and fretted.  After they won the second set, Hugh had rushed through his shower to catch Francine in order to confess privately about Hilda, but she was already gone.  Now what should he do?  Maybe call Hilda?   He suspected she wouldn’t mind that he didn’t feel right about seeing her again, had probably already filed it away as a one-night stand.  If so, telling Francine might become moot.  Yes, he would call Hilda first, on his cell from the street, out of range of the nosy ears of the office.

He was halfway to the door when he realized he didn’t have her number.  He had been too happy in her arms to ask for other ways to be in touch.

He tried information but she wasn’t listed.  Googling her yielded no phone number.  He remained stymied until Melissa popped in, red curls bobbing as she paced back and forth in front of his desk, apparently troubled by something.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“I’m going to lunch,” she said, stopping in her tracks and looking at him as if she needed permission.  “You must be starving.  Bring you back some sushi?”

“I’m meeting a friend for lunch,” he said, deciding on the spot that he needed the advice of an expert, namely Kyle, the most experienced man he knew when it came to single life and women.

Melissa followed him into the elevator, resuming her complaints about Karen overruling the new Wallinski for the festival premiere, presumably what had been on her mind.   When they reached the sidewalk, she snagged his arm and tugged him close, whispering, “I think what Karen’s doing to you is weird, you know?  I mean, like, really kind of inappropriate.”

Hugh freed his arm.  “What’s she doing to me?”

“Using your situation to keep her rich ladies happy.”

“Melissa.” Hugh adopted the stern yet calm tone that could bring Ginnie to heel without provoking tears.  “You’re the best number two I’ve ever had.  You have a bright future, but what’s inappropriate is you making assumptions about my social life.  And what’s even more inappropriate is for you to make assumptions about how Karen Watanabe, who is the best I’ve ever seen at fundraising, handles donors.”

Melissa was more sensitive than Ginnie: tears sprouted instantly.  “Oh God,” she gasped.  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Hugh.  I’m so, so sorry.  Please don’t be angry with me.”

“I’m not angry with you,” Hugh lied.  Melissa’s mortification was inappropriate too.  What was wrong with her?  But he had neither the time nor inclination to buck her up.  “Look, I’m late.  We’ll talk about this later.”  He moved rapidly east, waiting until he was a safe distance away to open his flip phone and speed dial Kyle’s landline.

“Hugh?” Kyle sounded surprised.  They never spoke on the phone except in emergencies.  An aspect of Kyle’s private, secretive nature was that he preferred to communicate by email, and in pre-tech days hardly at all.  “You’re not cancelling our tennis tomorrow?”

“No, no.  I’m about ten minutes away, haven’t had lunch.  Can I bring a box of sushi, veggie burger?”  Since giving up booze because of his fatty liver Kyle had also dropped red meat, dairy, and processed sugar and taken up long distance running.  He was as lean as a greyhound. “I need to talk.”

“What’s wrong?  Are you ill?  I don’t want to wait ten minutes to hear you’re dying.”

“Not dying.  I need . . .” Hugh sighed.  “I need dating advice.”

Kyle, who almost never laughed, laughed loud and long.

“Are you through?”

“Oh Lord, it was great to laugh like that.  My knees actually stopped hurting.  Okay, come on over.  But if we’re talking poontang, fetch us a pizza and some brewskies.”

Hugh stopped short on the sidewalk, appalled.  “Brewskies?  I’m not soliciting your advice if it means you’re falling off the wagon.”

“The brewskies are for you, moron.”

“I don’t like beer.  Remember, you self-centered prick?  And pizza?  Aren’t you vegan?”

“Get cheeseless then!  Sweet Jesus you’re worse than Nurse Ratched.”

Hugh brought a marinara and mushroom pizza and four Diet Cokes over to his buddy’s Greene Street loft.  Kyle ate four slices, listening without comment to Hugh’s at first stammering, then fluidly honest account of last night’s lovemaking and today’s homicidal tennis.  Kyle sat on a massive plaster and wood sculpture of his own making, one of a series he had begun a year ago.  He had soaked large uncut tree trunks in salt water and stabbed them into hunks of plaster that he had painted or dyed into a rusty grimy gray, creating what looked like enormous pieces of apocalyptic driftwood, as if Manhattan had been blown up and these petrified remains had washed up in SoHo.  Hugh very much liked one that suggested a gargoyle fused with a park bench.  The other two, including the one Kyle was using as a picnic table, didn’t speak to him.

“You don’t need dating advice.  You need career counseling.  Sweet Jesus.  Watanabe expects you to be a tennis walker for a rich donor?  That’s fucked up.”

“That doesn’t bother me.  What do I do about Hilda?”

“Should bother you.  It’s fucking inappropriate.  It’s like she’s pimping you out.”

“Stick to my question: how do I handle the situation with Hilda?”

“First you need to get her phone number.  Then, next time you’re horny you text her for a booty call.  You’ve got an eighteen-year-old son.  Don’t you know how the kids do it these days?  Friends with benefits.  Hookup culture.  Long as you use a condom, anything goes.”  Kyle drained the Diet Coke, crushed the can, and released an attenuated belch of pizza fumes.  “Am I living up to your vulgar expectations?”

“No, you’re not.  I want you to tell me how to manage this so that for once in my life, being involved with women doesn’t somehow cause me to abjectly surrender my will.  I’ve got two difficult conversations ahead of me. I have to handle Hilda so she doesn’t get pissed and tell her stepmother what a cad I am.”

“Because supposedly that’s going to cost the Foundation its funding?” Kyle asked with pointed sarcasm.  Hugh nodded.  Kyle tossed the flattened can at him.  It clattered as it came to rest amidst the mess of the loft’s work area.  In New York City’s bankrupt 1970s Kyle had bought an abandoned five-thousand-square-foot commercial space for eighty-thousand dollars; it was now worth millions but with its narrow unvarnished oak boards spattered with paint and covered by a layer of scattered wood chips and plaster dust, the ruined soda can fit right in.  “Where is all this bullshit guilt coming from?  Did Amy get a deathbed promise out of you that you weren’t going to get laid?”  Kyle, who seemed to be warming up for a long rant, abruptly cut himself off, wincing at what he saw on Hugh’s face.  “Sorry.  That was an exceptionally dumb ass thing to say.  You were genuinely happy with Amy.  Even I know that.  What I’m trying to say is that we both know you don’t have my appetites or my contempt for feminism, but this . . . what’s her name?”

“Hilda.”

“Hilda’s a big girl and so is the rich old lady.  They’re not in middle school.  Neither are you.”

“I almost am, Kyle. I haven’t dated since high school.  So please, give me the benefit of your greater experience.  What do I do?”

“If you want to have another roll in the hay with Brunhilda, don’t worry about it.   You didn’t steal anything from her.  I know it seems highly unlikely, or at least a failure of aesthetics on their part, but nowadays women admit they like having sex with men.  I don’t mean to be disrespectful of what you’re going through, but frankly a guy in your situation can get away with murder.  Me?  Twice divorced, three babies with three different women, going to AA twice a week, Hilda’d expect a heartfelt conversation about where this is going.  You?  You can fuck everything in sight for at least a year and they’ll all just want to mother you.”  Kyle made a rude noise and added with startling bluntness, a new characteristic since his sobriety:  “I never envied you, Hugh.  Even when I blew up my marriages, shat all over my career, I was still glad I wasn’t pussy-whipped like you, but now, sweet Jesus, you’ve got the leather in your hand.  Enjoy it.  Lord knows you’ve earned it.”

So Hugh’s male buddies could provide no emotional solace: Peter had thought he would be glad to learn he was in demand, and now Kyle saw Hugh’s tragedy as an opportunity to misbehave.  Walking back to the office, Hugh understood how they could miss the hole in his doughnut: no one they loved had died.

And Kyle had relaxed him, at least about his urge to tell Francine.  On reflection, his impulse to confess struck him as absurd, as if he had committed a burglary: “Thank you for dinner and by the way I stole your candlesticks . . .” As for Hilda, for all he knew she would never dream of telling her stepmother.

But calling Hilda and making sure she wasn’t expecting more, that seemed essential, more than ever.  As it turned out, he didn’t have to unearth her telephone number.  When he got back to work, Melissa said with a scowl, “A Hilda called.  She refused to leave a last name or say what it was about but wants you to call her right away.”  She handed him a note with a 917 number and seemed to wait for an explanation.

He didn’t provide one.   He entered his office and called from his late ’90s Nokia, still adequate, he believed, and not worth trashing in favor of an expensive upgrade.  He stood beside the windows, the farthest spot from his shut door.   Melissa’s cubicle was just behind it, close enough to worry him.

“Hello?” Hilda answered doubtfully.

“Hi, Hilda, it’s Hugh.”  He kept his voice to a murmur anyway in case Melissa had developed Supergirl’s hearing.  “I’m glad you called.  I stupidly forgot to get your number.  This number is my cell.  That’s always the best way to reach me.”  He sounded like a doomed, paranoid character in a thriller, fated to fall dying into the hero’s arms mumbling an incomplete solution to the mystery.  He brightened, raising the volume:  “How are you?”

“Uh . . . I’m good.  Listen.  This is awkward, but could we meet for coffee or something? For fifteen minutes?  I won’t keep you much longer?  I think we have to talk?”

Have to talk?  She thinks we have to talk?

“Uh, whenever’s good for you?” Hilda continued.  “I’m busy tonight at around seven?  But anytime before?”

She was making everything sound like a question, a tentativeness that grated on Hugh.  He had no time to see her this afternoon or evening.  He should stay in the office late to make up for oversleeping and tennis hooky.  “Um . . . tomorrow might be better.”

“I can’t tomorrow?  And I may go away for the weekend?”

“Five.  I can meet you at five,” he said, the suspense unbearable.

But when he tried to sneak out at 4:30, Watanabe complained.  “Hey!  You’re going?   What did you put in today?  Two hours?”

“I won for Francine, remember?”

“That’s right!”  Karen clapped her hands together rapidly.  “I love you, Hugh!  You’re my champion!”  Melissa, behind Karen’s back, made a face.

Well, at least someone loves me, he consoled himself, bitter that the first woman he had trusted with his affection since losing the love of his life had decided, after one sip, to dump him as if he were spoiled milk.

1.10

Hilda had asked Hugh to meet her at the least romantic spot in their neighborhood, the Union Square Starbucks.  Long and narrow, windows covered with a film of soot and further darkened by scaffolding, this iteration of the chain featured permanent rings on counters and tables, and baristas who took forever, often pausing in mid-brew to gossip with each other.  Yet this slow, dismal establishment was wildly popular with a motley crew: NYU students, tourists fighting jet lag, bloggers mooching WiFi, strangers exchanging cash for Percocet, the homeless flush with donations, real estate brokers checking emails or speaking on their cell phones.  Hugh couldn’t conceive of a less private place to be told someone wasn’t interested in him.

On arrival he had to credit Hilda with proving him wrong.  She had commandeered the most secluded table, in a corner against a wall and a window facing the Square.  They were protected from eavesdroppers on three sides.  A trio of students at the sole adjoining table had their ears stuffed with headphones, eyes mesmerized by the campfire glow of their laptops.  Hugh felt reassured no one but he would hear her rejection.

After checking that Hilda was content with her half-drunk green tea, Hugh got in line for a skim latte. As he waited for his dose of caffeine, a vivid memory from Sloan Kettering’s cafeteria returned to him—not a recollection of medical drama, a hopeful afternoon—and his anxiety about what Hilda was going to say burned off like a morning fog.

At that time, Amy had almost fully recovered from a raging infection, and had just been told she would be released the next day and could resume chemo in a week.  She had not yet been declared terminal.  Her room was crowded with optimistic friends, smiling children, the laughter of reprieve.  Hugh was free to take a break from his bedside vigil, snare a coffee, stroll outside and breathe air without a trace of ammonia.  Ahead and behind him, as always at Sloan, were the anxious, exhausted faces of people in his position.  That day he felt sorry for them, believed they didn’t have his emotional resources.  They couldn’t conceal loss and terror beneath the polite mask Hugh had fashioned in childhood to shield himself from the soured sarcasms of his mother and the low marks his father gave him in everything he attempted—except his tennis serve.  That day in the dreary cafeteria he had been suffused with gratitude that Amy would come home, available to Ginnie, Ray, and himself for conversation and snuggling; that he could resume playing tennis with Kyle; that he could watch the new Haneke film in the screening room, not squeezed on his laptop.  Those simple pleasures were gifts of incomparable value and he remembered vividly that he had promised: I’ll never complain again.  To have Amy well and at ease, surrounded by people who loved her, the children they had made together chuckling at her jokes—what more was there to want?

When Hugh finally sat down, latte in hand, he was grateful Hilda was going to relieve him of the sordidness of dating and restore him to the dignity of a chaste grief.

“Thanks for seeing me,” Hilda began.  “I kind of freaked when I called Francine to thank her for last night and she told me you had played tennis together.  I didn’t know you saw her regularly.  So the thing is, I want to ask you a favor.  Please don’t tell her about . . .”  She nodded toward the outside as if that’s where their lovemaking had been located.

Hugh chuckled.  “I’ll be glad not to tell her.  And by the way, I had no idea I was going to be playing tennis with your stepmother when I woke this morning.  Came out of the blue.  I never played with her before.  She called Karen, who volunteered me, so I had to say yes to your mother’s—I mean to playing in your stepmother’s game.”

“Yeah, she said you’d never played together before.”  Now Hilda chuckled.  “She LOVED playing with you.  It was hilarious.  She kept chortling about winning.  Never realized she was so competitive.”

“Ridiculous, isn’t it, to be competitive about mixed doubles,” declared Hugh, a perfect hypocrite. “Anyway, no worries about me telling her.  Or anyone.  I’m happy to forget last night.”

Hilda winced.  “You’re happy to forget it?”

“No, no.  Not happy to forget.  It was great.”  His cheeks warmed.  Tell her the truth! he told himself.   If she wasn’t going to say they shouldn’t see each other again, he’d have to. “Last night was a gift.  I’ll never forget it.”

Hilda grinned into her green tea.

“But . . . uh . . . of course, you know, my age and circumstance, and everything else, your stepmom, the whole situation, it’s insanely fraught, for both of us evidently, so that’s all I meant.  Better to keep it as a fond memory.”

Hilda squinted at him.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  She looked out at the Square and told its bare trees:  “I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

Ginnie’s eyes also fled from his whenever he was compelled to disappoint her, a pained diffidence that never failed to cleave his heart.  “Well, I . . .” His voice warbled, and he cleared his throat.  “I mean I’m still in mourning, and anyway you’re young enough to be my daughter.”

“That’s ridiculous.  I’m thirty-nine.  Were you married at eleven?”

“You’re . . . thirty-nine?”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Thirty.  Tops.”

“I’ll be forty in a month!”

“Huh.”

Hilda’s full lips formed a confident smile, their sexiest formation yet.  There was a tingling and a stabbing rise in his corduroys, a lightning fast reaction that hadn’t occurred in decades, obliterating all civilized considerations.

“I’m fine with whatever you want this to be,” she said.  “But I didn’t mean we should stop getting to know each other better.  I just don’t want my stepmother to know.  Frankly, I don’t want her to know anything about my real life.”

“Huh,” Hugh said again.  Nothing else was in his head but last night’s kiss, vividly replaying.

“Are you busy?” she asked.  “I have a class at seven, but I’m free until then.”

“I am free,” Hugh said in a robot’s monotone.

Hilda grinned.  “My place?”

He buttoned his overcoat before he dared to stand up.

Once outside he took her arm as they turned toward Fifth Avenue.  She moved into his chest and he found himself, there on the streets of New York, absorbed in kissing a woman who still seemed younger than he had ever been.  This time no dark memories interfered with his enjoyment.

That is, until they released.  When he opened his eyes to the world again he saw something that chilled him from head to toe.  Stopped at the corner by a red light, weighed down by two bulky shopping bags from Paragon Sporting Goods, was Cathy Moriarty, the woman who a few weeks ago had offered him a sympathetic shoulder and been told he was too grief-stricken even to share a meal with a single woman.  She stared at him with a look of outrage befitting a betrayed spouse.  And certainly Hugh skulked off with Hilda as if he were guilty of a mortal sin.

1.11

As Peter had warned, Hugh’s male acquaintances began clamoring to fix him up with women they believed to be perfect for him.  At least once a week, one or another called or took him to lunch and said, “I totally understand you need time but I want you to know that when you’re ready there’s . . .” and offered a woman who turned out to be a younger and slightly prettier version of the man’s wife. Oddly, the men were immediately contradicted by the wives themselves, who dismissed their doppelgängers as wrong for Hugh, and recommended friends whom he suspected, and in a few cases knew, they pitied for being single.  But no matter the motive or source, the available women sounded extraordinary.

There was a violinist who had been with the New Haven Symphony for ten years before shifting to teaching at the Yale School of Music once she became a mother.  She had a twelve-year-old son destined to be the next Yo-Yo Ma.

There was the television critic for Manhattan Magazine, whom Hugh had always admired for being witty about shows she didn’t like without also being mean to their creators.

And there were three actresses: a former Second Stage comedienne who had been a regular on Saturday Night Live and the lead in a hit sitcom, and who these days did small parts in big movies; a Broadway star with a soaring, almost operatic voice, who seemed to be in a hit musical every year; and, most tempting of all, a brilliant character actress whose tormented roles in Scorsese and Coppola movies and dozens of other indie films Hugh deeply admired.

Tempting though they were, Hugh continued to use his widower-not-ready card.  “I’m not dating,” he told his friends, hoping that would be the end of it.

But the subject came up with Karen, too.  At the Hamilton Film Festival’s opening night party, she downed three flutes of champagne and said: “Once you start seeing someone, don’t—do not—start playing tennis with your new honey and drop out of FF’s game. Yesterday she pledged us an extra half a mil.  It’s your serve that got us the raise.”

“I’m not dating,” he promised her.

The one person Hugh expected to leave him alone about all of this was Amy’s mother, but that only held true until Ruth called to insist Hugh bring Ray and Ginnie out to New Jersey just a few weeks after Thanksgiving for what she dubbed a Chanukah dinner, a brand-new family holiday gathering that Hugh presumed was an invention of grief.  After explaining she didn’t want to make another big meal so soon, that she wanted them to come to her and Bernie’s new golf club, she said: “So I have to reserve a table.  Is there anyone else you want to bring?”

“Anyone else?” Hugh asked, puzzled and unsuspecting.

“Someone you’re seeing?  You know, you can tell me if you’re seeing someone.  I hope you are!  We don’t want you to be lonely.”

“It’s . . . it’s too soon,” Hugh stammered.

“It’s too soon now.  I know that.  But when you’re ready there’s a lovely woman, the daughter of my friend Denise—you remember Denise Roth from our old club?  They switched too and by coincidence they’ll be there.  They love going.   Denise hates to cook.  Do you remember their daughter Sue?”  As was often the case, once Ruth had built up a head of steam she didn’t pause for him to reply; the answer was “not really”; he recalled only a blur of attractive and not-attractive members of a large family.   “Well, Sue’s very bright, very successful.  And lovely looking.  She works at New York Presbyterian in development.  She’s very bright.  I said that already, right?  And she has a great figure.  Runs marathons, or something like that.  Sue never married.  Couldn’t have children, which was the problem, I think.  What am I saying?  I don’t know!  She’s about your age.  She just moved into the city.”  Ruth paused, then added, “And she loves movies!” as if that were an astonishing coincidence.  “When you’re ready let me know, Hughie,” she concluded, perfectly reproducing her daughter’s affectionate intonation.

“I’m not dating,” he said yet again, as blandly as he could, but he was appalled, offended that his mother-in-law of all people could imagine he’d ever want to be with a woman other than her daughter—forgetting for the moment that four nights a week he was in Hilda’s bed.  He’d bring over one of his Criterion Collection DVDs and introduce her to the genius of Bresson before she reintroduced him to the genius of the blowjob.  Often, with a shameful cringe, he worried their relationship consisted of little more than a barter of his knowledge of film for hers of sexual gratification—preferable to an adjunct’s salary at NYU but less respectable.

Unlike everyone else, Hilda seemed content to leave the subject of dating unexplored, until one evening when they were talking with lovely openness and calm after sex.  She asked whether he had gone out with anyone since Amy’s death and he told her about his one-year moratorium, that he wasn’t ready for more than their—what did the kids call them?—hookups.

“We’re just hanging out,” she said, but her voice rose, as it often did, as if for a question.

“Are you asking me?” Hugh was prepared to explain that if she wanted more he’d have to beg off.

“No, no,” she said, resting her head on his chest.  “This is all I can handle right now.”  She had had a bad breakup recently, she explained, and still felt too raw.  “I’m happy,” she added and reached below to see if the old guy could manage a double-header.

The only people in Hugh’s orbit who never in any context, no matter how hypothetical, brought up the subject of Hugh falling in love again were Ginnie and Ray.  Ray stuck to politics and sports, often ranting with alarming intensity about the Iraq War or the Giant’s porous secondary; otherwise he avoided all emotional subjects, including his mother’s death.  The sole romance Ginnie mentioned was her own.  In 2003, after graduating Yale, she had followed her college boyfriend to DC because he had landed a promising job working in the Senate Majority Leader’s office, and she wasn’t sure what career she wanted to pursue.  Amy was too ill to be open with Ginnie about her disapproval of this move and Hugh too preoccupied.  They both nodded glumly when she rationalized it by saying after a year waiting tables and writing a blog about her daily doings, she might want to apply to law school, and so the city she selected didn’t matter.  Two years later, her boyfriend gave up on Capitol Hill and had just started law school at the University of Virginia while Ginnie had become self-supporting as a free-lance Internet writer.  Her work and love lives were stable—or so Hugh thought.

He was walking up Fifth to Hilda’s carrying a DVD, a screener of The Scion, a Hamilton grantee’s entry to the Sundance Film Festival, when Ginnie’s name glowed on his vibrating cell.  Thrilled as always by a call from either of his children (even if the thrill was also a heart-pounding terror until he established whether they were in trouble) he flipped open his Nokia and sang, “Ginnie!  Hi!”

“Hey,” she responded dully.  She paused as if he had placed the call and ought to explain why.

He prodded, “What’s up?”

She sighed and announced in deep gloom:  “The Post wants to hire me.”

“Wants to hire you?”

“Yeah.”

“And this is bad?”

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.  “It’s making me very, very anxious.”

Hugh stopped walking.  He was a block from Hilda’s and didn’t want to continue the conversation there. “What’s the job offer?”

“Blogging.  You know, they call it an on-line column, but really it’s blogging.  That’s good, you know, that’s the good part.  But they also want me to write articles for the Sunday magazine and do reporting for the paper.  You know, the actual newspaper.  I really don’t want to do that.”

“You don’t want to write articles for the Washington Post,” Hugh said in as neutral a voice as he could manage.

“No.” She sighed.   “Joe is furious at me.  He thinks I’m crazy to turn it down.”

“You turned it down!”

“No, no, Daddy, I didn’t do that,” she said, her voice small and pitched high, a five-year-old again.  “You know, I just told them I don’t really want to write for the paper.  I mean, maybe I will sometimes, but I don’t want to do it if that’s a requirement for them.”

“Uh huh,” Hugh said.  She’s out of her mind.  What’s making her so crazy?  “How are you, pumpkin?  What’s going on otherwise?”

Silence.  Then a sigh.  “Where are you?”

“On the street.”

“Where?”

“Outside our building,” he lied.  “I was going to the supermarket.  Do I have to be in a secure location to hear what’s going on with you?”

At his sarcasm she surprised him by laughing gaily, a merry echo of her carefree girlhood.  The happy sound reminded him of Ginnie gleeful on the beach during their annual two weeks on Block Island in August: chasing after her energetic mother, coaxed by Amy to ride the chilly waves, discovering a tiny, perfect crab in the sand, spotting the north star’s early appearance at sunset—away, always away from unhappiness.  “No . . .” Her giggles trailed off.  “Joey is . . .” Tears abruptly warbled her voice. “I think he wants to break up with me, Dad.  And he’s a coward about it.  He’s doing it really stupidly, really being a klutz about it. I’m losing him, Daddy.”

Hugh was devastated.  Not about her losing Joe, who was the kind of humorless, ambitious young man he had always avoided and didn’t really understand, the sort who wanted to win at everything, often did, and was never made happy by his victories.  Good riddance.  But not at this price; not if it meant listening to his daughter’s vibrant voice crack with heartbreak.  She had endured her mother’s illness and death; Hugh wanted sadness confined to her rearview mirror.  Eager to provide relief, he asked for details: “Why do you say that, pumpkin?  What did he say, actually say, to you?”

“He keeps saying that I’m not committed to my career, that we’re very different about how we see our futures, that maybe we’re incompatible, you know, all that crap, as if anyone wants to spend their whole life with someone exactly like them.  Anyway, that’s not the real issue.  The real issue is he says he thinks he needs to really focus on nailing law school, that he’s got to make law review to land the clerkships he wants, so he needs to live on campus full time, not see me every weekend.  I don’t know why he says it like that, you know, because he has to be on campus some weekends as an RA.    So he has to, even if he doesn’t want to, it’s not really ’cause we’re incompatible.”

“Right.  He has to spend weekends there because he’s an RA.  And he has to be an RA so he doesn’t drown in loans.”  Hugh lathered up the balm of denial:  “He’s not breaking up with you, honey.  He’s just going to law school.”

Silence.  She knew he was desperate to saying anything that might make her feel better and probably saw through his reassurances.  Fuck.  Why not tell her what he really thought? Joe was the kind of selfish asshole who never admitted he was selfish; his self-interest was always transformed into a higher calling.

“Yeah,” Ginnie finally said. “I guess you’re right.  I’m overreacting.  After all, he hasn’t moved most of his stuff out of our place.  As long as I have his complete collection of Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs we’re still living together.”

“Right.”  Hugh was disgusted with himself for enabling Joe’s manipulations but let it go.  “So, tell me about this job offer again.  Can’t you negotiate with the Post about how many articles you have to write?  Maybe they’ll be satisfied with one or two a year?”

“Huh,” Ginnie said.  “I didn’t think of that.  That’s smart.  You’re a smart cookie, Daddy.  You mean I could, like, define how many pieces I write for the paper?”

“Right.  Set a limit.”

“Right, right.  Oh, that’s great.  Like, get it down to a low number and maybe taper off the second year and eventually they’d let it go . . .” Ginnie’s typical sprightly energy was restored, a sweet legacy of her mother’s optimistic nature.  “Yeah, that’s what I’ll ask when I call them.  Great, Dad, thanks.  Listen, I’m here.  I have to go.”

“Where’s here?”

“Sorry, new fusion Mexican on 14th I want to blog about if it’s good.  Meeting Joe and the Gang of Five so we can order everything on the menu.  Call you tomorrow!  Love you!  Bye!”  She again sounded as pleased with life as if she were racing beside her mom on Block Island to catch more summer fun.

Hugh didn’t enter Hilda’s building right away.  On the sidewalk, he ruminated bitterly about Joe tormenting his daughter with criticisms of her character while scheming to make the relationship as convenient as possible for himself.  No doubt he planned to fuck adoring coeds on the side while keeping Ginnie available for holidays.  Hugh looked down at the movie he was bringing as an offering to the object of his secret romance.  Romance? Since when? He had been telling himself they were hooking up, and she’d said they were just hanging out, but if he was honest with himself their four-nights-a-week get-togethers would soon amount to more.  A stirring began as he flashed on Hilda’s warm breasts filling his hands, her lips opening to his, and he wondered, not for the first time, whether having a penis and being good were incompatible.  Before heading into Hilda’s lobby, he vowed, once again, to do the right thing and break up with her.

1.12

Hilda opened the door to Hugh with a delighted expression, but after she saw his face, hers fell.  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?  I call bullshit on that.”  She posed as for a playground challenge: hands on hips, chin thrust forward.  “Can’t be nothing.”

“Just something—not a big deal—with Ginnie.”  He brushed past her and sagged on the white leather couch without removing his overcoat.

She sat in an armless chair opposite, hands demurely in her lap.  She said sweetly:  “Please tell me about it.”

So instead of broaching the subject of the non-future of their non-relationship, Hugh confessed his worry that he had botched advising Ginnie about her selfish boyfriend. This broke precedent.  Until now he had promised himself never to disturb the tropical-island peace of their hideaway assignations with storms of grief or family life. Previously he could deflect Hilda’s curiosity about his children’s love lives by merely stating the facts that Ginnie had a live-in boyfriend and Ray a girl at college to whom he seemed attached at the hip.  Now she required details.  Filling her in took a while; she handled listening to Ginnie’s romantic history as if it were a bank audit, requiring disclosure of all facts dating back to the first transaction. So he opened the books of Ginnie’s college relationship with Joe, its violent, sobbing break up and matter-of-fact reconciliation a week later, that drama cruelly coincident with the news of Amy’s diagnosis.  Then he gave an accounting of Ginnie following Joe to DC in the immediate aftermath of learning that her mother’s treatments had failed.  Reliving these crises, Hugh was reminded that at each turn he had wanted to tell Ginnie to be less committed to Joe, and each time had held his tongue, constrained to be tender because of her mother’s illness.  The prior missed opportunities exacerbated his worry that on this occasion he had egregiously goofed, that now, during the relative calm of grieving for her mother, he ought to have encouraged Ginnie to seize this law-school pause as a chance to be independent of Joe.  “This guy is just gonna keep her on a string until he’s a lawyer pulling down big bucks and if, at the end of it, he’s bored with her, he’ll let her sink to the bottom,” Hugh concluded bitterly.

“Wow,” Hilda said.  “You really don’t like him.  And you’re right.  He sounds like my ex-boyfriend.  I wasted ten years waiting for him to commit.”   She shook her head.   “Ten years wasted.   Waiting for him to grow the fuck up.”  She brightened, smiling at Hugh.  “I’d love to meet Ginnie and Ray.  They sound great.”

Hugh was alarmed.   If she had passively waited ten years for her ex-boyfriend to declare himself, she might be on the brink of repeating the pattern with him.  His suspicion was heightened when she hurried to add, “You know, when it’s appropriate.  When you’re comfortable.  Speaking of comfortable, why don’t you take off your coat?”

“I don’t think I should stay,” he blurted.  He looked down at his winter-white hands.  The veins bulged like rivers on a topographic map.  An age blemish below his index finger had turned darker and bigger.  And was that . . . yes, a new spot on his left hand.  He was old, pale, bald, well past the expiration date for romance.  Soon he would look like his father did in his last years: a mottled gray driftwood of a man, askew on cracked bones, bleaching in the sun.

Hugh raised his eyes to Hilda, determined to tell her that their secret liaisons must end.  His heart almost stopped at what he saw.  Her face had the about-to-wail shock of an infant who has fallen.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “I’m in a terrible mood.  Not fit for company.”

Relieved, she hustled over, kissed his cheek and whispered, “I want to be here for you,” with a touching earnestness.  It was utterly clear now.   How could he have failed to perceive her real feelings?  Because it was convenient for me. Men.  We’re monsters.  “Let’s watch young Cartwright’s offering to Sundance,” he said.  “It will calm me down.”  Actually, he hoped it would allow him the chance to think about how he could minimize Hilda’s distress when he summoned the courage to tell her they needed to stop whatever it was they had told themselves they were doing.  He put the DVD into her player, turned off the lights, and settled on the couch, distant enough from Hilda to discourage snuggling.

While Hugh liked nothing better than to share a superior film with another, he also treasured having no distraction from losing himself in the filmmaker’s work.  He especially longed for a splendid isolation this evening, a respite from fretting over Ginnie’s and Hilda’s vulnerable hearts.  This was one of the gifts of watching a serious work of art: by society’s conventions, he was permitted, even admired for ignoring the living, breathing human beside him.

And no question they were watching a great film, Lincoln Cartwright’s ambitious first full-length feature, The Scion.  Hugh’s enthusiasm for it spanned years.  Development of the script had been fully funded by a Hamilton Foundation grant he’d awarded and its production partially by another.  It told the story of three generations of a Durham, North Carolina, African-American family, charting their rise out of slavery during Reconstruction, continuing through their greatest prosperity at the turn of the century, and climaxing with their eventual decline by the early twentieth century with the full-blown return of the KKK and the enactment of Jim Crow laws, winked at by Woodrow Wilson’s federal racist policies. This made the movie sound like an earnest social-realist melodrama but it was decidedly not that in Cartwright’s telling.  Cartwright was an imaginative and bold twenty-six-year-old filmmaker who had loosely based his script on anecdotes from his own family.  He dramatized their history impressionistically through the anguished, self-hating memories of a half-black half-white scion, the grandson of a man born into slavery who died a prosperous dry goods owner.  During the desperate days of the Great Depression the scion passes as white, eventually winning election to Congress on a platform of  “keeping America safe for the Master Race.”  By using the traitor-to-his-race grandson as narrator, Cartwright had freed himself from the pedantry of sociology and oversimplification.  His unreliable and evolving main character was at times oppressed, at times heroic, finally villainous, and always tragic.  Cartwright’s stream of consciousness filmmaking, a weave of memory and feeling, showed off his extravagant gift for designing images in elegant tableaus that evoked place, people, feeling, and idea.

Hugh and Hilda were watching the final cut prior to The Scion’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.  It was the best of the seven versions Hugh had seen.  The film, always very good even when rough and too long, seemed now to Hugh to be a masterpiece on the order of Citizen Kane.

While the credits rolled Hilda didn’t move or speak.  Hugh stood up, turned on a lamp, shut off her TV.  “Wow,” she said at last, blinking at the harsh light.  “Wow.”

“You should really see it on the big screen,” he said.  He was feeling abandoned, an emptiness in his gut that always followed an absorbing film, dismay at being returned to the prison of his skin, confined to the trivialities of his consciousness.  For two hours and fifteen minutes he had forgotten tennis elbow, sore back, the frightful image of himself as a teetering version of his father, the hollowing absence of Amy, the moral bankruptcy of his relationship with Hilda, and the dread that his children were permanently dented by sadness.  Also that he was hungry.

“I’ll get to see it on the big screen at the festival next fall, right?”

Another by-the-by assumption of their future together as a couple and somehow he was shocked again: how had he stumbled into exactly what he wanted to avoid?  Meanwhile Hilda was waiting for an answer.

“Way before then.  A year from now everyone will have seen it.  In a month it’ll be the talk of Sundance.  Probably won’t be a bidding war, it’s not commercial enough, but Miramax’ll pick it up for peanuts, premiere it at the New York Film Festival next year, get half-a-dozen nominations and make a killing.”

“But if Harvey Weinstein buys it wouldn’t he want to premiere it at your festival?”

“Harvey wouldn’t let us have it unless I can convince Karen to open with it.”  Thinking about the tawdry maneuverings for prime slots in the festival didn’t cheer him up.  Tell her, he thought.

“It’s so amazing!  Why wouldn’t Karen let you open the festival with it?”

“She might.” Tell her now.  “Depends on what else is hot at the time.”

“But it’s yours.  You gave him a grant.  There’d be no film without you and the Foundation.”

“Thanks.  That’s not really true, but thanks for the thought.” Hugh tried to smile.  He needed a drink.  “You want a glass of wine?” he asked while heading into her kitchen.  There was usually a bottle of white wine in the fridge.

“Why isn’t it really true?”  She followed him into the tiny galley, and he felt and was cornered.

He waved a Chardonnay at her.  “Okay if I open?”

“You go ahead.  I want a Glenfiddich. It’s the holiday season.”

“The holiday season.”

“That reminds me.  I wanted to talk to you about Christmas.  Are you staying in town?”

“Not going anywhere.”

“Did you used to go somewhere?”  She opened a cabinet and removed a tumbler from a set of heavy crystal inherited from her mother’s mother.  She poured out a generous portion of thirty-year-old single malt.

“Not since my mother passed.  We used to go to her house in Massachusetts.  Anyway, Ray’ll be home, so yeah, I’ll be in town.”

“You guys didn’t used to go somewhere warm?”  She sipped from her dazzling glass, refracting the kitchen’s halogen, bejeweling the dark brown scotch.  She reminded him of his Great Aunt Helen, who was not as tall but had Hilda’s regal posture and voluptuous figure.  Great Aunt Helen had managed to be at once large and vulnerable, shifting abruptly from scolding her relatives to fits of self-recrimination and tears, all the while never letting go of her bourbon-and-soda.

“Dad used to take us to Barbados for Christmas,” Hilda continued.  “I loved it there.  So warm.”  She sipped again, eyes on the prism of single malt as she ventured, “Maybe we should go to Barbados in January.  You know, right after the New Year.  To get warm.  A friend from boarding school has a house there.  She’s offered to let me use it.  She can’t go.  She said I could bring anyone.  How about that for a deal?  A week in the Caribbean for the price of an airline ticket?”

He could plead Sundance was coming up.  He could point out Ray wouldn’t be returning to Brown until the fifteenth.  Those were accurate outs.  He said nothing.

“You’re too busy, right?  Karen won’t give you the time off.  You’re too busy.”

“It’s not just that,” he said, putting a toe into honesty’s cold waters, ready to tell her he couldn’t, he shouldn’t see her anymore.  His heart thumped.  His throat closed.  Of all the no’s one could say to a woman this was the nuclear No.

“We’ll keep it secret.  Just tell your family you’re going somewhere.  I could tell Francine I was skiing.  You could say . . . I don’t know what you’d tell your kids, but we’ll think of something.”

Another available easy out, the surrender of Yes.  Agree, have a glorious week with the ease of being with someone who knew only him, not his losses, had no memory of Amy and his youth, who knew only the battered Hugh that had washed up on the shore.  No. It was time to end this painful misunderstanding.

Before he could, Hilda asked, “Why did you say that it isn’t really true you made The Scion possible?”

“What?” he said, confused by the change of subject.

“I said you funded it, you helped Cartwright develop the script, and you gave him his first tranche of the money he needed for production, but you said it’s not really true.  But you did do those things, didn’t you?”

“Someone else would have given him the dough; that’s all I meant.  It was a brilliant idea and his short was brilliant.  If we hadn’t given him the money to develop his script—and hey, it wasn’t a lot, just twenty grand—some other group would’ve.  And once he’d written that stunning script he didn’t have any trouble raising money for the shoot.”

“Wow.”  Hilda drained her glass and immediately moved to refill it.  “You really have self-esteem issues.”  She turned to him with glass extended, toasting him.   “Give yourself credit.  That movie is great and if it weren’t for you it wouldn’t exist!  You are brilliant at what you do.  And what you do is really, really important.”

Hugh decided not to continue insisting that he had been in no way essential to the making of Cartwright’s film.  Amy knew—Amy had known, had known—that he didn’t need to exaggerate his contribution to feel good about his work, that he despised the acquisitive self-delusion of his colleagues when they called other people’s creations “our script,” “my festival,” “my movie.”  Amy had known that he was satisfied simply to be proximate to the art he loved.  But why be surly about Hilda’s flattery?  Her kindness didn’t deserve that.   Besides, it was pleasant to listen to.  So he resolved to stop hectoring her about his unimportance.  And also not to break up with her—tonight.

1.13

“Hugh, my dear,” Leslie said, laying her hand over his, pinning it with firm affection. “I’m sorry to ask you, but I have to get to the bottom of this.  Someone—I don’t even really understand how this horrible person knows anything about you—has been saying terrible things about you and it’s reached my ears . . .” Leslie chuckled as she tried to complete the old-fashioned phrase: “And they are burning.  Or on fire.  Or something.”  She patted his hand, a soft gavel calling him to order.  “I have to know why this strange woman is saying shit about you.”

“What are you talking about?”  Hugh slipped his hand free, intensely agitated that anyone was speaking ill of him.  He was no saint but he did fancy himself to be a decent man, and certainly not a villain.  He couldn’t imagine who would be critical of his character now that his father and fourth grade teacher were dead—at least he assumed Mrs. Freed had passed.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to ambush you like that,” Leslie said, recapturing his hand with maternal love: the help of last resort, what dying soldiers yearned for as they bled out.  “We ran into the Freedmans, Linda and Ben, remember them?  Their daughter went to P.S. 41 for a while with Ray?  Then they moved to Jersey.  Amy was pretty friendly with Linda?” Hugh was shaking his head; he didn’t remember.  “Anyway, doesn’t matter.  From back in the day they knew someone named Cathy Moriarty, whom they bumped into recently and somehow your name came up and this Cathy Moriarty person said you were only pretending to be grief-stricken, that you’re dating women young enough to be your daughter.”

Hugh blushed violently, and Leslie glanced at her husband, Guillermo.  Hugh didn’t expect support from that quarter: he suspected Guillermo wasn’t thrilled by the intimacy that had developed between him and Leslie during Amy’s illness, a closeness that was persisting unabated after her death.  Not that he believed the hip and handsome Guillermo could ever be made nervous by his bald, tweedy self.  Gui’s good looks were notorious in their set, Latin lover central casting: tall, lean, olive-skinned, smoldering black eyes and a full head of salt and pepper hair.  The physical was enhanced by the romance of his profession, a jazz pianist of world-wide cult fame.

But Guillermo surprised by nodding approvingly, as if he understood everything and there was nothing for Hugh to be ashamed of.

Comforting as his blessing was, Hugh felt it was tainted.  Guillermo was often on the road, especially in Latin America, or playing until the wee hours in the disappearing jazz venues of Manhattan and Brooklyn, living a pirate’s life compared to the pale workaday men Leslie’s friends had married.  He was devoted to his children and loving to Leslie, yet most of their friends assumed that in a sophisticated Latin way—Guillermo’s family had fled Castro’s Cuba when he was five—he had succumbed to the temptation that most women found his irresistible good looks to be, in fact, irresistible.  His readiness to assume the worst about Hugh and treat him as a comrade confirmed that view of him.  He took hold of Hugh’s shoulder with his powerful fingers and squeezed; other than the day of Amy’s funeral, Hugh couldn’t remember him being so affectionate.  “You deserve what comfort you find, my friend,” he said.

“Oh . . . oh, of course,” Leslie stammered, grabbing her Perfect Manhattan. She took a long gulp as if it were the antidote to poison.  “It’s none of my business,” she said before she’d finished swallowing, and she dribbled a line of brown liquid onto the white tablecloth.  She dabbed at her lips, crying out, “Oh my God, what a klutz!”  Eyes averted from the still blushing Hugh, she mumbled, “How do you know this person? Do you know this person?”

“Yes, I know Cathy vaguely,” Hugh said.  “From years ago when Ray was in middle school.”

“Do you know her today?  Do you have any idea why she’s saying shit about you?”

“What exactly did she say?”  Hugh’s guilt had molted into anger.  How dare she turn a paper cut to her vanity into cause for slandering him!

“She said . . .”  Leslie turned to Guillermo. “I can’t say it.”

Guillermo again laid a hand on Hugh’s shoulder and kneaded, his piano-strong fingers producing more pain than massage.  “You really want to hear what this bitch had to say?”

“Gui!” Leslie said.

“Talking this way about our friend?  She’s a bitch.  Be glad I’m not saying she’s a cunt. Which she is.”

“You’re terrible,” Leslie said with a grin.

“You really want to hear it, Hugh?” Gui said.

Hugh nodded while he tried to figure out how to explain Hilda.  What would Leslie think of him?  On the surface she displayed no distress at his dating, but underneath, he suspected, out of love for her dead friend, she wished he would remain chaste.

Guillermo sighed.  “This woman said, or rather Linda quoted her as saying: ‘Hugh’s a lying sack of shit about being too grief-stricken to date.  He’s fucking girls young enough to be his daughter.’”  Guillermo looked off, toward the Knickerbocker’s piano, shut up on a Tuesday night, and smiled to himself.

“A lying sack of shit?”

Guillermo murmured, “I’d never heard that insult before.  Lying sack of shit.  Has a kind of melody.”

“Cathy Moriarty called me out of the blue!  I could barely remember who she was.”  Hugh heard his voice squeaking like a guilty boy’s.  “She offered her shoulder for me to cry on.”

“What?!” Leslie exclaimed.  “You were crying to her?”

“No, I wasn’t crying.  I just answered the phone.  She used the expression ‘a shoulder to cry on.’ She offered to cook me dinner.  I said that was nice, but it felt like a date and I’m not dating.  She made a friendly offer to go on walks and so on, but I said no.  I didn’t mean to be rude but I guess it really pissed her off.”

“I told you,” Guillermo said.  “A woman scorned . . . ”

“Wait, wait.” Hugh raised a hand.  “She’s not making everything up.  I am seeing a woman.”

“Oh,” Leslie said and then nothing more.  She gawked at him.

“Not seriously.  And she’s younger than me, yes, but she’s not Ginnie’s age.  She’s forty,” he said, absurdly padding her age by a year.  “I guess Cathy Moriarty needs new glasses.”

“Good for you, my friend,” Guillermo declared.  “You’re a man and that’s how a man consoles himself.”  Hugh couldn’t help but feel a zing of pleasure at this macho approval.

“I have no idea what the hell that means.” Leslie finished her Perfect Manhattan with a big gulp.  “So when do I get to meet her?”

“Meet her?” Hugh stammered.

“Yes.  When do I meet her?”

“Never.”

“I don’t get to meet a woman you’re dating?” Leslie laid a hand across her bosom and pouted.

“I mean,” Hugh said, “I hope you meet her as a human being, but not as my date.  We’re not dating.”

Guillermo twisted away to summon a waiter.  “Of course you’re not dating,” he said, and just as Hugh was about to thank him for understanding, he turned back and added, “You’re just fucking her brains out.”

1.14

Chanukah dinner with Amy’s parents in New Jersey promised to be a gloomy celebration.  Hugh borrowed Leslie and Guillermo’s 1996 Volvo to drive himself and his children to Ruth and Bernie’s country club.   “Does Grandma,” asked Ginnie, riding shotgun, “plan on adding Chanukah to her annual holiday calendar?”

“It’s already happened,” Ray said from the backseat.  “Grandma’s a ruthless imperialist of family celebration.”

“Oh God,” Ginnie said.  “She’s grabbed new territory and will never give it back.”

“No, no,” Hugh said.  “I agreed to it this year because it’s the first holiday season since your mother’s death.  If I had said no they wouldn’t get to see you guys until Passover, and this year that’s just too hard on them.”

“They just saw us for Thanksgiving,” Ray said, objecting in his most lawyer-like tone.

“That was with the whole extended family,” Hugh said.  “Tonight’s just us.”

“But why do we have to schlep to New Jersey?” Ginnie said.

“Yeah, Mom used to invite them over for dinner,” Ray said. “We’d have traditional Jewish holiday food: takeout Chinese.”

“Exactly!” Ginnie said.  “They’d give us checks and those fake gold chocolate coins.”  “Chinese and chocolate,” Ray said. “ Good times.”

“Why didn’t we do that this year?”

“Because,” Ray answered, “Mom could fight Grandma to a draw, waging guerrilla war against her stormtroopers of guilt.  But Dad is…”

“Vichy France!” brother and sister finished together and laughed uproariously.

“In a year,” Ray said when they settled down, “Grandma will add Sukkot to Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur to Chanukah and we’ll be practically living in the hell of New Jersey for four straight months.”

“God, you’re right.” Ginnie said.  “This is a total disaster.”

Not for the first time, Hugh felt guilty that he and Amy, by their poor example, had made their children callous to the unconditional love their maternal grandparents lavished on them.  Every year of their young lives they had heard their parents bitch and moan about the Jersey drive; Ruth’s tasteless food, occasionally avoided, but only in favor of the country club’s bland fare; Ruth and Bernie’s word-for-word retellings of family anecdotes and political observations; and their predictable reactions to the most popular Broadway shows, Hollywood movies and bestselling middlebrow novels.   He listened to his thoughtless resentment played back through his children and winced at the clang and whine of its ungrateful melody as they continued through the Holland Tunnel and the gaseous landscape of the Jersey Turnpike.  As they meandered on the bucolic two-lane roads of horse country near the club, Ginnie and Ray shifted to grumpy and presumptuous observations about a new development of eight-thousand-square-foot homes they passed, saying it was “people like this” who had voted in George Bush for a second term.  They fell into a gloomy silence once Hugh drove through the gates into the vast expanse of the coiffed golf course.

“They don’t have a special Chanukah dinner,” Ruth greeted her grandchildren.  “First of all because tonight’s Friday and it starts on Sunday—which anyway this year is also Christmas—and second because there’s no such thing as a traditional Chanukah dinner.  I hope you’re not disappointed.  Chanukah’s not really a holiday we celebrate, you know,” she informed Hugh, forgetting, as she always did, that as an outsider he had made certain to know more about Judaism than she.  “Hello, dear,” Ruth said, approaching Ginnie first and offering the outside of her right cheek to be kissed while she bussed air.  Hugh had long felt that Ruth behaved more like his chilly Scottish mother than a stereotypical Mrs. Portnoy.  “I would have given you brisket and noodle pudding,” she told Ray as she offered a cheek to him, sounding grandmother-like until she added, “but I didn’t feel like cooking.”

“Do they have their pigs in blankets tonight?” Ray asked his grandfather.  Bernie moved into his grandson’s arms, hugged him hard and planted a kiss on his cheek.  That lived up to Hugh’s notion of a Jewish family’s warmth, a marital bonus he treasured.  At his own mother’s funeral, Hugh’s grieving father had greeted him with a firm handshake.

“I would have resigned if they didn’t,” Bernie said.  “I told them my grandson was coming and they dare not disappoint him.”

“Good work, Pop-Pop,” Ray answered in the gentle voice he used with his grandfather, an arm cradling the old man’s bowed back.  In his late eighties Bernie had become unsteady on his pins.  He often fell, usually escaping with no worse than scrapes, but last year in his own driveway he’d broken his wrist.  Since then, Hugh had noticed that when his son and Bernie walked or stood together, Ray kept an arm around his grandfather, or at the very least a steadying hand on his elbow.  After Amy’s diagnosis and especially after her death, Ray had developed a reputation for ferocity in conversation.  His once merely opinionated and contentious manner regarding politics gave way to rants and spread to innocuous subjects, and he badgered anyone who disagreed with him into submission. In moments like this one, though, Hugh could see that the sweet boy underneath was still in residence.

Bernie kissed Ray’s cheek a second time for good measure, then opened his arms to his granddaughter.  “Come here, beautiful.”  Ginnie hugged him hard and long.  She liked to hug.  As did Ray.  As had Amy.  There were no handshakes at her funeral.

They followed Ruth’s vigorous stride into the cocktail lounge, where Ray came to a standstill at a buffet of his favorites: pigs in blankets, cocktail shrimp, and fried dumplings.  “Don’t fill up on that junk,” Ruth ordered him.

“Good luck implementing that policy,” said Ray the political science major.  He filled a plate to overflowing, six of each vice, and defiantly ate them in front of his grandmother, hardly pausing to chew while she daintily nibbled on a rounded slice of carrot.  Eighty-year-old Ruth was lean and erect and apparently tireless.  If she had aches and pains she never mentioned them.

“Why are you being so mean to Grandma?” Ginnie admonished Ray.

“I’m not being mean to Grandma,” Ray said.  “I’m being kind to myself.”

“You won’t have any room for dinner,” Ruth said.

“Oh I’ll have room,” Ray assured her.  He popped a fried dumpling into his mouth.

“Use a fork,” she said.

“This is how Asians eat dumplings.”

“No they don’t! They use chopsticks!” Ruth said triumphantly.

“That’s false,” Ray said.  “Chopsticks, as you call them, are used by authentic Asians to funnel rice like this.”  He pantomimed a shoveling motion into his mouth.

“I’m sick of all those faux Asians using chopsticks incorrectly,” Ginnie mumbled.

“Only Westerners use chopsticks to pick up food,” Ray said.  “In most of the world what’s considered unpardonably rude is eating with your left hand.  You eat exclusively with your right because it’s the left hand you wipe your ass with.”

“Ray!” Ruth cried out.  “That’s disgusting.”

“Most of the world is disgusting, I agree.”  Ray’s plate, heaping moments ago, was clean; he stood resting it on the cantilever of his stomach.  This caused Hugh to notice his once lean boy had grown a beer belly, a stunning revelation.  Ray had been home for Thanksgiving.  How had Hugh been blind to this?  And now Ray was turning toward the buffet for reinforcements.

Ruth leapt to her feet, blocking his route.  “You’re coming with me to say hello to the Roths.  You too, Ginnie and Hugh.  I promised my friend Denise I’d bring you all over to say hello.”

“What?” Ray said to his father.

Ginnie mumbled, “Don’t make a fuss.”

“We’re going to say hello to the Roths,” Hugh said.

“Why?”

“They’re lonely?” Hugh suggested.  Ray’s belly no longer looked as prominent.  Maybe he was sucking it in.  Maybe Hugh had imagined it.

Ruth grabbed Ray by the wrist, towing him while calling back to Hugh and Ginnie,  “Let’s go!”  She aimed for a large group settled in wing chairs around a coffee table covered with drinks and appetizers.

The Roths looked vaguely familiar to Hugh from the many meals he’d been served at the club before Amy’s diagnosis.  After that she had refused to celebrate at a golf club.  “One good thing about cancer,” she had explained to Leslie, “I get to decide the venue of my mother’s events.”

Hugh definitely recognized the short, big-bosomed woman who rose to meet them.  She sported a tower of teased hair, dyed the color of blood, sickly against her extremely pale, unnaturally smooth skin.

“Denise, these are my grandchildren, Ray and Ginnie.  And you remember Hugh, of course.”

Hugh felt the eyes of the Roths on him as he greeted their matriarch.  He had a blurred impression of three generations, from ten to eighty.  He couldn’t turn their way because Denise, after kissing him briefly and firmly on the lips, grabbed each of his hands and squeezed while saying, “I’m so, so sorry about Amy.  She was such a good person!  Always remembered to ask after my poor mother, even when she was just a little girl.  She would inquire after my mother and also Sam’s mother.  Everyone in my family.  So considerate!”

Amy was kind-hearted and polite enough, but this meticulous standard of courtesy didn’t sound like her.

“And so musical!  So talented.  Piano, right?”

“You’re talking about my niece,” Ruth corrected her.  “She’s the pianist.  Amy couldn’t play a thing.  None of us can.  We don’t have an ear for music in our family!” she announced as if it were a point of pride.

“Your niece is in your family,” argumentative Ray pointed out.

Ruth had no interest in that debate.  “Sue!” she called, singling out a woman from the tribe of Roths.  “Sue!  Hi.  These are my grandchildren, Ginnie and Ray.”

Meanwhile Denise took firm hold of Hugh’s wrist, as if he were a reluctant teenage boy, and towed him toward Sue, who looked to be about his age.  “Hugh,” Denise said, “you remember my daughter, Suzie.”

He nodded as if he did, though he didn’t.  Sue didn’t resemble her fireplug mother.  She had a slight, elegant figure, porcelain not freckled skin, hair black not scarlet, sharply defined features dominated by large, solemn gray eyes.  Sue was strikingly beautiful but what was truly arresting was the sly expression she directed at Hugh, seeming to imply they were sharing an inside joke.  “Hi, Hugh.”  She greeted him in a familiar tone, as if they saw each other everyday, and started to rise.

“Don’t get up,” Hugh said.

She did, on high heels that brought her to his chin.  Hugh knew her elegant black shoes were fashionable, but Amy wasn’t there to identify them as Jimmy Choo’s.  “How are you managing, Hugh?” she continued in a familiar tone, a buddy checking in.  She wore a perfume he liked that reminded him of Amy.

He had trouble answering.  Something about her confident, intimate tone, the relaxed amusement in her manner entranced him.  He managed a grunt.  His eyes scampered away so he might collect himself.  He caught Ginnie and Ray staring at him.  Ginnie was frowning so hard her eyebrows had met in the middle.  Ray was displaying the dispassion of a research scientist checking on his lab rat.  Hugh returned to focusing on the lovely Sue.  He cleared his throat but could think of nothing to say.

“I was very sorry to hear about Amy,” Sue offered, wonderfully at ease with a topic others found awkward. “I met her about ten years ago.  She was so funny, really hilarious, about picking up your now very grown up children from camp.  I remember she talked about wanting to burn their clothes.”

“Suzie lives in Manhattan,” Denise broke in.  “Not far from you, Hugh.  You’re in the Village, right?  Sue just bought a place in SoHo.  And she loves movies.”

Ah, that was what Sue was implying with her tone, the joke they were both in on.  She knew Denise and Ruth wanted them to meet.  It came as something of a shock to Hugh that Ruth’s taste was so good.  He noticed she was keeping an eye on them while announcing, more than introducing, Ray and Ginnie to the other Roths.

Denise didn’t bother to disguise that she was intent on monitoring her matchmaking.  She hovered beside them, watching with an open-mouthed, wide-eyed expression of intense expectation, as if waiting for Hugh to propose.

“I’m so unusual.  Right, Hugh?” Sue winked.  “Who likes movies?”

She’s funny.  That’s good, Hugh thought, excited.  A different voice interrupted: Wait. I’m taken.  A third Hugh chimed in: By whom? You’re not dating Hilda.  The cacophony threw him off the track of the conversation.  He gawked at Sue’s sly expression.

“What do you do, Hugh,” Ruth said, “when you have to see all those movies?  You don’t go alone, do you?”

Ginnie took his arm and pulled him protectively close.  He followed Sue’s eyes to his daughter, who now directed her unibrow frown at Sue.

“Don’t tell me you watch them all by yourself,” Ruth pressed.

“I’m sure Hugh’s screening card is full,” Sue said.

“We have to go,” Ginnie announced.  “Grandpa is sitting there all by himself.  He looks so sad.”  She twisted away, taking Hugh’s arm with her.  Hugh was forced to turn or do himself injury.

“Nice to see you again, Hugh,” Sue said as he staggered two steps away but then stood his ground, stalling his daughter’s progress.  She called, “And you too, Ginnie.  Haven’t seen you since you were a little girl.  You’ve grown into a beautiful young woman.  Happy holidays.”

“Happy holidays,” Ginnie answered to the ceiling.  “Come on, Daddy,” she insisted.  When he didn’t immediately obey, she yanked hard—one more instance, in a lifetime’s worth, of being towed by a woman to a port of her choosing.

1.15

“What the hell was Grandma talking about to that woman? Asking if you go alone to movies?” Ginnie had been stewing since meeting Sue Roth.  This was what bubbled up after fifteen minutes of silence in the passenger seat.  Ray was sprawled across most of the back seat, deafened by his iPod earphones, staring at the Jersey landscape of malls and the occasional correctional facility.  Hugh had also been pensive. He and Ginnie had the same woman on their minds.

“I don’t think Ruth really understands that I screen movies at work most days.  Or that I get DVD screeners to take home.  She doesn’t really know how I do my work in general,” he said diplomatically.

“For a second it almost seemed like she was trying to fix you up with that woman.”  A heavy silence followed until Ginnie exclaimed:  “Don’t tell me that’s what Grandma was doing!”

Hugh had never developed a taste for secrecy, especially with his children.  He practiced it when necessary or merciful but otherwise did his best to be straightforward, another of the many ways he tried to differ from the example of his father.  “I think it was more coming from her friend Denise.  And I think ‘fix up’ is overstating it . . .”

“How would you state it? That’s exactly what it was!” Ginnie was more or less shouting.  “OH MY GOD, Grandma was matchmaking!” Now she was shouting.

Ray pulled out his ear buds, leaking rap lyrics and an insistent beat.   “What?” he asked.

“Aren’t you just . . . APPALLED?”

“Are you talking to me?” Ray said.

“Nobody’s talking to you, Ray.”  This was as unpleasant as Ginnie had ever been.

“That’s sad,” Ray commented mildly. “Are you yelling at Pop?”  He leaned forward, head thrust between father and daughter.

“Dad,” Ginnie prompted.

Hugh considered what he could say.

“Dad,” Ginnie repeated.

“What are you badgering Pop about?” Ray asked.

“Did you know about this scheme of Grandma’s, Dad?”

“Ah!” Ray leaned back, searching for his earbuds.  “The fix up.”

“See?” Ginnie said.  “It was obvious to everyone.  So don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m not pretending anything,” Hugh complained, stung.  “Couple weeks ago Ruth mentioned that her friend—”

“Couple weeks ago!” Ginnie exclaimed.  “And you didn’t tell me?”

“Why should he tell you?” Ray asked.

Hugh pressed on, “Her friend had a daughter who was, you know, a good person…”

“A good person.” Ray chuckled from the backseat.  He had the buds poised to be reinserted as soon as this conversation became tiresome.  “Is goodness what you want in a date?”

Hugh talked over him: “ . . . who had lost her husband . . . ”

“Lost her husband.  Where?” Ginnie said. “At the mall?”

“What?” Hugh said.

“Bad joke, sorry.”

“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune,” Ray said, quoting Oscar Wilde. “To lose both looks like carelessness.”

Ginnie twisted about and snarled, “Oh shut up!  Sarcasm doesn’t always have to be your default.”

Ray often seemed enraged during routine conversations.  Faced with Ginnie’s out-of-proportion anger he reacted gently.  “I wasn’t being sarcastic and I’m sorry I offended you.  But I think you should bear in mind that Dad has to live his life and I’m sure Grandma would like to have a hand in that.”

“What does that mean, ‘Dad has to live his life’?  Of course he has to live his life.”

“His life will include dating.”

“Dad isn’t dating!” Ginnie lunged toward the backseat as if only the safety belt could prevent her from assaulting her brother.  “He isn’t dating for a year!  He told us.  Remember?  At Thanksgiving?  He told us his therapist said he shouldn’t date for a year.  Jesus, don’t you listen to anybody?”

“No, I only listen to my girlfriend.  With her there’s an incentive.  But you’re the one who doesn’t listen to what people say.  Dad told us he decided not to date for a year and asked for his therapist’s approval.  Not the other way around.  This is Dad’s impossible-to-pull-off idea and maybe he came up with it because he was worried you’d freak out if he started dating.”

Ginnie turned toward Hugh.  She might have startled him into a crash, but as a precaution he had already slowed to well under fifty and shifted into the right lane, a snail’s pace for the Turnpike.

“You decided not to date for a year?” Ginnie said.  “Your decision, not your shrink’s?”

“Just a second.  I’m looking for a rest stop.  Are we near the Walt Whitman?”

“You mean the Grover Cleveland,” Ray corrected.  “That’s the last rest stop before the Holland.”

He didn’t see a sign for the Grover Cleveland or any other rest stop.  He exited anyway to gas up Leslie and Guillermo’s car as a thank you, and to avoid killing what was left of his nuclear family.  While he turned onto a service road Ginnie again thrust her face across the bucket seat divide. “So not to date for a year was your decision, not your shrink’s?”

“He’s not really a shrink.  He’s a grief counselor.”

“Not a shrink, a grief counselor.” Ray chuckled.  “Poor Pops,” he added.

Hugh spied a Mobil Station and slowed to enter.  “And yes it was my idea, not his.”

“Remember now, sis?” Ray said.  “We were on the way home from Thanksgiving at Grandma’s, on this same bucolic turnpike, and you were fishing to find out if he was dating by asking if he was too lonely without Mom . . .”

“I was not fishing!  Jesus, you’re a dick.”

“That’s true.” Ray inserted his ear buds, and collapsed back, re-sprawling himself across the seat.

Hugh arrived at the less-explosive haven of a gas tank.  He hopped out to fill the Volvo, but was immediately reminded of New Jersey’s bizarre state law that barred self-service by an alarmed attendant jogging his way and waving him off.  Hugh stayed out, preferring to chat with a stranger about the Giants while the car was fed than brave more of his children’s conversation.  He saw Ginnie talking, presumably to Ray, although Ray’s ears were stuffed with music.  Meanwhile, he realized he had made a mistake, an odd one.  Sue Roth wasn’t a widow.  Ruth had told him she’d never married.  Why had he put her in his category?  In any case he decided against correcting the record with his children.

Once the Volvo was satisfied and the attendant paid he remounted.  Before turning the key he raised his right hand, the ancient sign from his children’s toddler days that he was about to make a speech.  Ginnie folded her hands in her lap.  Ray sat up, earbuds still in.  “Can you hear me, Ray?”

Ray smiled and nodded.

“Let me just set a few facts straight.  All Grandma said was that she knew I wasn’t ready to start seeing people, but when I was ready there was this woman—whom I’m assuming was the woman we met tonight—and she lived in Manhattan and was nice.  That’s all.”

“And she likes movies,” Ginnie said, voice dripping with contempt.

“And she likes movies,” Hugh admitted.  “But I’m not ready to start dating so none of it should bother either of you.” Hugh turned to Ginnie. “We okay?”

“What do you mean?” she snapped.  “I’ve always been okay with your dating.  You were the one who came up with this cockamamie one-year rule.  I don’t want you to be alone.  I just want you to be happy.”  She folded her arms across her chest, looking as unhappy as she had all evening.

Hugh called back to Ray, “We okay?”

“What?”  Ray removed his earphones.  “Did you say something to me?”

“Jesus,” Ginnie said.

“I’m still not dating for a year, okay?”

“You’re asking for my approval?”

“No.”

“Good.  Because it’s none of my business.”  Ray grinned at his sister and re-stuffed his ears.  Hugh rejoined the flow of traffic and they rode the rest of the way home deaf and dumb.

1.16

Hugh had promised Hilda that by Christmas he would give her an answer as to whether he could sneak away to her friend’s house in Barbados in January.  But having celebrated Chanukah by denying to his children that he was dating, he wondered all over again if he should continue to see Hilda at all.  Going on a trip, no matter what they told themselves, would mean they were a couple of some sort, closer to being married than to dating.  And if he said no to an ideal winter vacation wasn’t that a passive preliminary to breaking up?

Better to be honest with her and his children by ending it.  He had made no promises.  If he stopped seeing her, no matter how hurt she might feel, she couldn’t claim he had misrepresented the limited nature of their relationship.

Still, he wished with all his heart he could avoid telling her in person.  He was cowardly enough to contemplate a hand-written letter or a phone call so he wouldn’t have to witness her immediate, unguarded reaction.  He wished he could ask Roberto Salazar’s opinion, but their grief counseling sessions were on Christmas hiatus until January 3rd.

He had just about convinced himself a phone call would be merciful to Hilda, not to mention himself, when Ginnie, three days before returning to DC to celebrate New Year’s with Joe and friends, entered the living room in tears.

“The fucker did it by email,” she announced, clutching her Blackberry in both hands as if it were a tiny bible.  Her round face, the shape of Amy’s, was relaxed, but tears were steadily refilling her light-blue eyes and skimming down her fair and, like Hugh’s, easily reddened cheeks.  One tear in particular lingered on her chin.  She bowed her head and read Joe’s email aloud as the tear fell on her screen: “‘You know I care about you and I’ll always have feelings for you but I’m too busy at school to maintain a relationship and, to be completely open and honest, I know that eventually I’ll want to be free to see other people while we’re living so far apart.’ Far apart!” Ginnie interjected.  “It’s a hundred miles!”  She returned to reading: “‘Sorry to break up long distance but moving my stuff out while you’re away will be less painful for both of us.’”  She shoved her Blackberry into her jeans.  “He’s too busy to have a relationship but not too busy to fuck co-eds.  What an asshole.  What a cowardly asshole.”  So far anger had effortlessly powered her speech.  Cursing him released a sob.

Hugh hugged her, and she laid her head on his chest.  He stroked the tight dirty-blonde curls.  They were an amalgam of his straight yellow hair and Amy’s auburn waves.  Caressing her like this brought back carrying her in a Snugli.  She had been a fussy baby, happiest when held.  Her head was trembling.  No more noise, though.  He swayed from side to side, the old technique of soothing her.  After half a minute she calmed, as she had more than two decades ago.  Hugh could see Amy—not corporeally, but he could feel her at the fringe of this embrace.  She was mute, yet he heard clearly what she was saying:  “Stop fucking around.  Take care of our babies.”

Ray appeared, earphones in, not seeing them, too intent on his goal, the kitchen.  When he reappeared with a box of Stoned Wheat Thins, a knife, and a jar of Skippy, he noticed them.  He was in boxers and a white T-shirt, the newly grown tummy clearly outlined.  He must have put on twenty-five, maybe thirty pounds.  Even for the first semester of freshman year that was too much.  Ginnie was clinging to a toxic love, Ray to saturated fat.

Ray removed his earphones.  With the knife he gestured a question mark at Ginnie that she couldn’t see.  Her back was to him, and anyway she had buried her face in Daddy.

Hugh mouthed: Joe broke up with her.

Ray frowned.  He blared in his public address voice: “Just now?”

Ginnie startled in Hugh’s arms.  She peeked out at her brother, then shivered and hugged Daddy tighter.

Ray put Wheat Thins, Skippy, and knife down on a side table and came over.  He rested a hand on his sister’s back and rubbed in a comforting circle.  “He’s a dick.”

She nodded.

“He’s always been a dick,” Ray said.  “He didn’t just become one today.  He was made in standard dick mold.  He’s still only a first-year law student, but he was born a soulless corporate lawyer.”

Ginnie chuckled reluctantly, gratefully.

“This is a good thing for you,” Ray said.  He kissed the back of her head, then retreated to collect his foodstuffs.

Ginnie watched him.  “I love you, Ray,” she called.

“Love you, sis.”

“Don’t get fat.”

Ray cocked his head and carefully thought through this change of subject.  “I still love you,” he decided and took the food into his bedroom.

Ginnie peered up at Hugh, eyes swollen, red.  “Dad, I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.”

“I mean about being silly about Grandma and that woman.  I was a pill.  I’m sorry.  You don’t have to wait a year to date.  I’m okay.”  She hugged him again.  “I’m okay with it.”

In thirty minutes Ginnie’s two closest friends arrived.  With the determined hustle and bustle of paramedics they carried her away to be resuscitated.  Shortly after, Ray’s girlfriend Mai appeared from some family obligation of hers.  They barricaded themselves in his room.  Based on past experience, other than brief sightings when they foraged for food, they would not be seen for at least eighteen hours.

His evening suddenly free—he always held himself in reserve in case his children should be available last minute—Hugh called Hilda’s cell.  They had not spoken for three days, the longest silence since they met.

“Sweetums!” she answered.  “Glad you called.  I didn’t want to bug you while you were with your kids.  How was Chanukah?”

“We survived.  Barely.  Are you home for a little while?  Can I stop by?”

“You betcha.  You can stop by for as long as you like.  Longer,” she giggled, sounding two drinks into merriment.  “Are you hungry?  I just came from Francine’s Christmas Eve clusterfuck. I ate instead of relating to anyone but I’ll meet you somewhere discreet if you’re starving.  Or we could order in, like always.”

Even inexperienced Hugh knew that breaking up in a public place to forestall a scene was chicken shit.  He said he just wanted to come over for a little while.  He marched to her apartment without rehearsing a speech or imagining her reaction to the miserable act he was about to commit, both likely to detour him.  He fancied his robotic state of mind must be what executioners affect before they dispassionately end a life.

Hilda didn’t derive a hint from his grim appearance or manner.  Nor his no-lingering peck on the lips, his squirming out of her arms, his shedding of goose down coat on a chair instead of hanging it in the front closet, and not even by the tell of all tells—his declining a glass of wine and saying, “We have to talk.”

“Sure,” she said brightly, standing at the entrance to her tiny kitchen.  “What about?”

“You should sit,” Hugh said.  Still no alarm on her face.  He settled on an armless chair and gestured for her to sit on the couch.  At last some inkling appeared to set in as she obeyed, hands in lap, waiting for him solemnly and curiously.  He sighed, couldn’t hold her eyes, his drifting to the floor.  “You know I’ve had a great time getting to know you and being with you but you remember what I said at the beginning and it’s true, I’m not really available, I’m still . . .” He cleared his throat rather than say ‘in mourning.’  He was surprised to hear himself making Amy the cause.  That was a lie.  Ending things with Hilda had nothing to do with grief.  For one thing, his vow was still in effect, to be independent for at least a year, to learn who the hell this Hugh was.  And for another, although Hilda was beautiful, sweet-natured, and great in bed, she could never be his wife, companion to his final days, the last face he would see before journey’s end.  When the time came to marry again, to bring someone into his children’s lives, he didn’t feel the childless and still somewhat immature Hilda was appropriate.  Amy, the memory of his marriage, the loss of her, that wasn’t the obstacle.  And yet what a handy excuse!  Much less hurtful than a rejection.  “So while I’m going through this mourning process it just feels wrong to me for us to continue seeing each other this way.  It’s not fair to you and really it’s not good for me.  You should be dating guys who are available and I should be dealing with my grief.”  Calmed by hearing the compassion, the reasonableness, the kindness of his speech, he dared to look at her.

Hugh thought he had seen the full range of expressions Hilda could produce.   She had wept on two occasions, once speaking of her mother’s death and—to Hugh’s astonishment—once after a series of rapid orgasms.  He had also seen her look angry with him after he casually called investment banking legalized fraud, her mouth, nose, and brow collapsing into a face-wide frown.  Now she showed him utter shock, profound surprise.  She had had no clue.

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” she stammered.  “What did I do?  Why are you dumping me?  What’s happened?”

“Hilda, I’m not dumping you.  I have the greatest respect for you . . .”

“THEN WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?” She clutched her stomach as if he’d stabbed her.

“Honey.” He crossed to the couch, straightening her into his arms. “I’m not dumping you.  There’s nothing wrong with you.  You’re fantastic.  Smart.  Beautiful.  Great to be with.”

“Then why?” she groaned.  “Why are you throwing me away?”  Pooling tears were all he could see of her eyes, narrowed and wincing.

“I’m just not ready,” he pleaded.  “Amy died six months ago.”

“Great,” she mumbled.

“Great?”

“Eight,” she enunciated.  “She died eight months ago.”

Confused, Hugh counted. “May,” he said then stopped himself.  “Well, she died May 29thth so really May doesn’t count.  June, July, August, September, October, November, December.  So it’s seven months, really.”

“Okay, seven!  Thirty days!  I was off by thirty days.  So were you.”

“You’re right, the exact amount doesn’t matter.  I was with her for thirty years.  Compared to that six months, eight months, a year, is a very short time.  It’s just too early for me.  I’m sorry.”  Hugh paused.  “This is my fault.  I should never have started seeing you, even secretly.  It was unfair to put you in this position.”

“What’s the difference?” She pushed out of his arms.  “It’s bullshit.  Just bullshit saying this was different than us falling in love, regular dating, all that.  This is the way real relationships start: intense talks, hot sex, lots of time alone together.”  Hilda crossed her arms, eyes narrowed and glaring.  “You’re dumping me.  You took what you wanted and now you’re throwing me away.”  Her voice had cleared of pain.  It rang like a brass bell:  “I’m going to tell Francine.”

“What?”

“She should know the kind of user you are.”  Hilda stood.  “Go.”  A wince cracked her stern demeanor.  Her lips trembled.  “Just go,” she mumbled.  She turned away and waited for him to obey.

He took a final, appreciative look at her strong calves, shapely buttocks, the length and strength of her back, her cascade of blonde hair.  She was proud and direct, different from the other women he knew well, and it struck him how few he had known as intimately.  He was grateful she had shared so much of herself.  He wanted to apologize again.  He wanted to excuse himself again, to reassure her about her future happiness, and most of all to part without ugliness.  Instead he made sure to say “Goodbye, Hilly,” because he had learned that unlike his finer feelings, goodbyes could last forever.

1.17

Descriptions of the Christmas and New Year holidays for the Reynolds household are best skipped, so heavy were their days and nights as a motherless family.  The exception was an encounter Hugh had on December 31st at ten-thirty in the morning.  He was fetching a third cup of coffee from the Melitta drip in his galley kitchen when a six-foot African American woman blocked his exit.  He gasped at her silent, sudden appearance.  He was only momentarily startled:  it was Mai.  He was used to Ray’s girlfriend being almost his height, but a new hairdo, a woven tower of gold, red and black dreadlocks, had added six inches.  The last time he saw her, two days before, she’d had braided cornrows flush to her scalp.

“Wow,” he said, stepping back to get a wider angle.  “Your hair looks great.”

“You’re so nice about that,” she said.  “You brought up Ray to be polite that way too.  He always notices when I change something and compliments it.”  She slowly maneuvered her long neck, a thin column for the grandeur of her head, ninety degrees to the right, then pivoted one hundred eighty to the left, seemingly testing whether the bouquet of threaded hair was properly balanced.  “I’m still not sure about the dreads.”

A spice—tamarind? something Indian—wafted from her.  Hugh worried it was racist of him to notice she smelled of anything, especially food seasoning.  He concentrated on seeing her as a human being but got stuck on body parts.  First, her bone-thin arms, bare in one of Ray’s pre-washed Gap tees.  Second, the sharp points of her shoulders under the fabric, as if she had neglected to remove a hanger.  And last the hollows above and below her collarbone.  He wondered if her ancestry was Sudanese.  He hoped she wasn’t anorexic, his speculation crossing the Atlantic to middle-class America.  Mai was decidedly middle-class, her mother an OB/GYN, her father an insurance executive who had died of cancer, roughly four years ago, Hugh believed. That was how she and Ray had met, in a Brown support group for students whose parents had died.  She had been raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and hoped to be a public-interest lawyer.

I’m racist to think of her as exotic, Hugh decided, sinking deeper into the mud of self-disgust he had been mired in since his cruel treatment of Hilda, a guilt worsened by her not having acted on the threat of telling Francine—at least so far.

“I’m probably standing strong precisely because my mother hates my hair like this,” Mai went on to explain.  “She says I’m being self-consciously ‘African,’” she added, forming air quotes with her astonishingly long fingers, which looked equal to Hugh’s.  It occurred to him with a thrill that if six-foot-two Ray married her, his grandchildren would be able to palm a basketball.

“Aren’t dreadlocks Jamaican?” Hugh ventured.

“Exactly!” Mai said, approvingly pointing her elegant index finger at him.  She sighed.  “Either way, my mother’s point is ‘You from Connecticut, girl,’ as she chose to put it.  Whenever Mother wants to sound hip she ends up imitating Oprah.”

“Sounds more like Dr. Phil than Oprah,” Hugh said, encouraged by his previous success.

He was granted another finger point. “Right!”  She focused her enormous amber eyes on him; they were exquisite, shimmering jewels.  That his son was enjoying the affections of this exceptional young woman was comforting, especially given that when it came to his children’s futures Hugh’s heart was fretting for two.  He wondered what Amy would have said about her, or rather about Ray’s devotion to her, that Ray seemed more interested in her than in his studies.

“Mr. Reynolds, I wanted to discuss something with you,” Mai said.

Hugh didn’t answer, preoccupied by a conversation with Amy he would never have.

“Mr. Reynolds?”

“Hugh,” he said, not for the first time. “Please call me Hugh.”

“My mother wouldn’t approve of that,” she said, also not for the first time.  “I may be having relations with your son”—Mai smiled slyly, mostly to herself—“although she’s in denial about that, but even so she wouldn’t believe that was cause for me to be informal with an adult.”

“Your mother and mine would have gotten along,” Hugh said.

“That so?” Mai asked innocently and with a note of profound skepticism.

“Well, at least about manners they would have been in agreement.  But please tell me anything that’s on your mind,” Hugh said.  He was keen to learn what he could from her.  Ray used to confide his every hope and hurt to his father, but since the day Amy was declared terminal he had sealed shut.  Hugh feared beneath Ray’s argumentative rants something urgently needed to be discovered and healed.  This remarkable young woman had the keys to his son’s secret heart.  Maybe she would open it for him.

“I wanted to ask you, Mr. Reynolds, and I only dare to ask because Ray says it’s okay for me to ask.  Actually he said ‘It’s appropriate,’ which sounded strange, as if Ray were a television shrink, which he most certainly is not.  Anyway, what I wanted to ask you, sorry I’m very slow to get to it, another trait of mine that makes my mother even more impatient than she usually is . . .” Out of breath, she inhaled deeply before continuing. “My point is that I took his word as permission to ask whether you would be willing to entertain an introduction to my old voice teacher, Mrs. Fletcher.”  Mai, for the first time in their acquaintance, looked flustered. She lowered her gleaming eyes to the floor and shook her head.  “Former, I meant to say former.  Louisa Fletcher is not old.  She’s about your age, which is certainly not old.”  Mai interwove her fingers prayerfully at the waist of her black jeans.  They were probably the smallest adult size manufactured and yet they looked loose on her.  “She’s a widower, recently lost her husband, just last year.  Like you, she isn’t interested in dating or anything remotely of that sort.  Like you, she had a very happy marriage.  She’s a very intelligent and cultured person, as you are, and is fantastic to go to concerts with.  She was kind enough to take me to the opera several times since her husband passed and it’s an education—a fun education, I mean.  I remember your saying that one of the things you missed was giving up your Carnegie Hall subscription.  Mrs. Fletcher has one to the Met, of course, but she also loves jazz.”

Ray appeared from the gloom of the hallway behind her.  “And?” he prompted.

Mai glanced at him.  “And?”

“You didn’t tell my pop the best part.”

Mai returned her attention to Hugh and smiled broadly.  “And she loves movies!”

Mischievous Ray grinned at his father.  The laughter this pulled from Hugh surprised him as much as it did Mai.  Hearing Ray’s chuckles she wheeled on him, demanding to know what prank he had played.  Ginnie appeared fresh from the shower in bathrobe and towel head to find out what the fuss was about.  Hugh explained, Ginnie giggled, and Mai attacked Ray, who fell to the floor laughing helplessly while she pounded his chest, saying, “How dare you punk me, mister!” and for the only time that holiday season there was laughter throughout the Reynolds home.