Part 7 (2/2)

On her way downstairs she peeked into the study but Robin, as April pretty much knew she would be, was gone. April had the cab let her off at 72nd and walked the rest of the way home to straighten out a little, and on the way she checked the phone and found a text from her mom: Where R U? She bought a pack of Juicy Fruit at a newsstand to clean up her breath. She came in through the downstairs door but went up to the kitchen for a bottle of water and saw the lights, like lights from a swimming pool, flickering on the walls of the darkened media room. Her mom was curled up against the arm of the couch. She smiled. ”Everything okay?” she whispered.

April nodded.

”How was the party? Who'd you hang out with?”

”Robin was there, actually,” April said.

”Oh yeah? How'd she seem?”

”Pretty good. She maybe had a little too much to drink.”

”She got home okay?”

April nodded. ”I put her in a cab myself.” She blew her mother a kiss and started back toward the kitchen, but then she stopped.

”What's on?” she said.

”A River Runs Through It. Ever seen it?”

She had, but it didn't really matter; she went down to her room, put on some pajamas, and came back to lie down on the couch with her head in her mother's lap. Cynthia stroked her hair for a minute and then took her hand away. On the screen were these still, mountainous landscapes and endless skies, so dreamy that the hot guys in their fetishy western garb just seemed like figures in a painting, and after a few minutes of that she couldn't keep her eyes from closing, but whenever they did, what she kept seeing was the man in the attic. April reached up, grabbed Cynthia's hand and placed it on her head again, just like she'd done when she was little-just like she'd never stopped doing, really. Some people were in such a hurry to pretend they didn't need their mothers anymore, like they couldn't wait to leave behind the things that were great about being a kid in the first place, the things they still liked but for some reason thought it was important to feel ashamed of liking. She didn't understand those people at all.

In his office one May afternoon Adam got a call from his brother saying that he and his wife, Paige, were coming to New York for something called the upfronts; he didn't want to take Adam up on his offer to stay with them-writers, he said, got few enough perks in this world and he wanted to soak his employers for every room-service amenity he could think of-but they agreed to come over for dinner on their first night in town. Conrad had never been to the apartment on Columbus before. The brothers were less a part of each other's lives than they would have liked, mostly on account of geography and work schedules but also because of Paige. Twelve years younger than Conrad, she felt intimidated and rudely excluded by any conversation that referenced the years before he met her, when she was just a child; she also had a suspicion that Cynthia did not like her, which was entirely correct.

”What the h.e.l.l does your brother see in her?” she would ask Adam after every encounter; Adam would shrug supportively, but he knew the answer to the question. Conrad made a tidy living in Los Angeles writing movie scripts even though nothing he'd written had ever risen high enough on the developmental scale to be acted out by performers in front of cameras. One of his screenplays, though, had led to a staff job on an hour-long TV drama called The Lotus Eaters The Lotus Eaters, about a group of high-school students who lived in Hawaii. Conrad traveled there twice a year, along with the entire production staff, for research purposes, and on one of these trips he had become better acquainted with Paige, a production designer who worked just two offices down from him back in LA. There was something about those Hawaiian junkets that accelerated intimacy. Adam knew his little brother well enough to know that the point was not so much that Paige was attractive but that she was attractive in a certain sterile, cla.s.sic way-blonde, very thin, small-featured, always put together-that Conrad had long ago convinced himself was out of his league. It made perfect sense that the first woman who proved him wrong on this score would be the one he wound up asking to marry him. Now they spent their off-hours at clubs and concerts and bars trying to absorb osmotically, for scriptwriting purposes, the rituals and value systems of privileged eighteen-year-olds. Paige was an enormous help in this regard.

After dinner the kids disappeared downstairs and Adam brought four gla.s.ses filled with whiskey out onto the patio, where Conrad was pointing out various New York landmarks, not always correctly, to his wife. The moon hung over the park and the blue-lit planetarium, low enough to be scored every few minutes by the silhouette of a plane. ”This is quite something,” Conrad said. ”Who knew there was such good money in being a master of the universe?”

Paige sniffed her gla.s.s, made a face, and put it down on the table. ”Maybe it's not too late for you,” she said, in a kind of musical voice intended to suggest she was teasing. ”Maybe you could still get into the family business.”

”I would,” Conrad said, ”if I could even figure out what the h.e.l.l it is he does.”

”Not a problem,” Adam said. ”Always room for you, Fredo.”

They all laughed, Paige a little less heartily, because she didn't know who Fredo was. In an effort to keep the conversation from escaping her completely, she said, ”You know who would totally lose it over this apartment, Con? Tracy.”

Conrad nodded vigorously as if he'd been thinking the same thing. ”Who's Tracy?” Cynthia asked. ”Tracy Cepeda is our show's chief location scout,” Conrad said. ”She would collapse if she saw this place. She'd offer you a mint to shoot in here. Even though we'd probably need to CGI some sand and palm trees out these windows.”

Adam felt his cell phone vibrate; he ignored it. It was hard for your eye not to be drawn to Paige because she was, in a way that was compelling without being at all s.e.xual, so flawless. When she opened her mouth she became Paige but when she was silent, and still, there were no idiosyncracies in her face at all. Adam knew from Conrad that she had started out as an actress but did not like to talk about how badly that had gone.

”You better be careful he doesn't write you all into the show,” Paige said, elbowing him. Conrad winced. ”Please,” he said. ”But it's true that this place looks like a set. And so do the people in it. I mean, no joke, we spend weeks in casting trying to find kids who look exactly like April and Jonas. Adam, this is bourbon? What kind is it?”

”It's rye, actually.”

”Wow,” Conrad said. He held up his empty gla.s.s and stared into it.

”Oh, Connie, you'll have beautiful children too,” Cynthia said. ”Provided Paige can find a way to reproduce without you, that is. What is that called again? Reproduction without s.e.x? Paige, what's the word I'm looking for?” Adam shot her a look intended to signal that she was close to the borderline.

”If you're ever hard up for money, just fly the family to LA, and both kids will have agents before you're out of baggage claim,” Conrad said. ”Parthenogenesis, by the way, is what it's called. Seriously, though, I can't quite believe I'm related to them.” He stared at Adam. ”You either,” he said, swiping at his older brother's stomach. ”Seriously, what kind of Faustian s.h.i.+t is going on around here? You literally do not look a day older than you did in college. It's annoying as h.e.l.l. What is the secret?”

Adam smiled. ”Commitment, mon frere,” mon frere,” he said. ”Commitment to the body. You should try it.” he said. ”Commitment to the body. You should try it.”

”Commitment my a.s.s. You're a f.u.c.king vampire.”

The cell phone buzzed in Adam's pocket. The incoming number was Devon's, which was not something that was supposed to happen. ”Excuse me a second?” he said, and went inside.

The three of them stood silently in front of the moon for a while, arms crossed on the patio railing. Conrad started. ”Jesus, I just almost dropped my gla.s.s over the side,” he said. ”Parthenogenesis. There, I can still say it. Cyn, where's the bathroom?”

”There's one off the kitchen,” she said, ”and one just to the right of the front door as you came in.”

When he was gone, Paige and Cynthia exchanged a quick and awkward smile, and then went back to gazing over the railing, into the pocket of darkness that was Central Park.

”I'm sorry I said that about having children,” Cynthia said. ”I mean, it's really none of my business. I was just giving him s.h.i.+t. We've known each other forever.”

Paige tipped her head to indicate it was nothing. ”You have a beautiful family,” she said. It was just one of those polite expressions people used when they couldn't, or didn't want to, come up with anything else to say; but for some reason it got to Cynthia this time. She felt a little sting at the corners of her eyes.

”Yeah, well,” she said, trying to stop herself but failing, ”that's what people start saying to you when you get a little older yourself. You have a beautiful family. It's like, yeah, we can tell you were hot once. You notice I don't get any of those remarks about how I don't look any different than I did twenty years ago.”

Paige, for once, looked quite thoughtful.

”Time is different for us,” she said.

Adam walked back onto the patio, stuffing his cell phone in his pocket. He looked back and forth between the two women. ”What?” he said.

It was an old story, how time favored men over women, but in Adam's case, Cynthia thought, it was just as Conrad had said: he wasn't growing more distinguished as he aged-it was more like he wasn't aging at all. His waist size hadn't changed since they got married, which was freaky but at least explicable, considering what a fanatic he was about it. But he wouldn't even have known how to do anything to his face except wash it and shave it and yet that looked the same as it always had too. It wasn't the first time someone else had confirmed it for her. True, he didn't have too many vices, unless working out too hard counted as a vice, which she thought it probably did. He spent too much time in the office, he didn't sleep enough, but whatever toll all this might have been exacting, none of it showed in his face. And if you pointed this out to him, he didn't even understand what you were talking about.

She couldn't compete with that. She still went to the gym three or four times a week, but she had long since come to consider it a ch.o.r.e and, in an effort to at least make it diverting, had gone through fickle infatuations with every bit of technology in there, every new fad and philosophy. The two of them belonged to different gyms-she would never have dreamed of working out with him, he was far too humorless about it. Still, like him, she was interested in hanging onto her physical prime for as long as possible-indefinitely, really. Together they did quite a good job of it. And there was one respect in which Cynthia-though she'd never discussed it with him-was prepared to go further in this effort than he was. They had three friends who'd had work done already; she told Adam about the first two, and then when Marietta had her eyelids and neck done Cynthia had said nothing and waited to see if he'd notice, which he never did. It wasn't like Marietta's t.i.ts had gotten bigger or something; she was only confirming Adam's sense of what she was supposed to look like anyway. Aging would have been more conspicuous. Cynthia still looked fantastic-everyone said so, and she knew they were serious-but it was so hard to look at yourself with fresh eyes. That was the insidious thing about time and its effects: how incremental they were. So far, so good, was her thought, but whenever the moment came, there was no resource she wouldn't call upon.

In the cold morning overcast, wearing shorts and a t-s.h.i.+rt and a lightweight ski hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, Adam put his palms flat against the facade of his building and pushed, until the tightness left his calves. He s.h.i.+fted his hips forward and slowly lowered one heel to the sidewalk, then the other, and when his Achilles tendons felt loose as well, he was good to go. He bounced on his toes a couple of times, exhaled once forcefully through his mouth as if preparing for an entrance onstage, put one finger to his watch, and started running.

Though he kept to the south side of 81st Street, where the sidewalks were wider on the perimeter of the museum grounds, it was still stop and go; he had to work his way around or through the knots of tourists and the pairs of strollers advancing in unison as their nannies chatted behind them. There was nothing to be done until he crossed the transverse exit at Central Park West and pa.s.sed through the low stone gate into the park, and then he found his rhythm. He glided around the softball fields, pa.s.sing everyone else on the path-the fat guys with headbands and hair leaking up from the collars of their s.h.i.+rts, the women in Lycra tights with sweats.h.i.+rts tied self-consciously around their waists, the serious rope-muscled runners with the perfect strides and fixed stares-feeling the familiar warmth and pulse of his blood radiating from his core until there was no part of his body uninvolved in it. He'd never been to the Conservatory Garden before, but he knew roughly where it was-not far from their old apartment, the one where April and Jonas had shared a room. He could have shortened his time by cutting across the North Meadow but it was blocked by that temporary soft orange fencing that signaled a reseeding; so he pa.s.sed all the way out of the park again on the east side and turned north along Fifth Avenue until he saw the theatrical flight of stone steps that led down into the garden. It was laid out in the dimensions of a cross, with trellised roses and reflecting pools on the right and left of him; at the far end, at the foot of a flagstone path, another flight of steps led up to a long, curved, and colonnaded stone arch, and there, sitting on the top step with his arms around his knees, wearing a khaki suit, was Devon.

He stood up slowly and bemusedly as Adam sprinted up the steps, touched his watch again, and stood gazing around the garden with his hands clasped on top of his head, waiting for his heart rate to slow. ”Mult.i.tasking,” Devon said, a little bitterly. ”Nice. No reason meeting me should interfere with your regimen. Won't you have to go home and change now, though, before work, or is it Casual Tuesday or something?”

Adam shook his head. ”Not going in this morning,” he said. ”The boss and I are flying to Minneapolis in a few hours.”

They stood beneath the arch, facing back toward Fifth Avenue across the top of the sunken gardens. In the unseasonable cold the paths were almost empty, but not quite; the incongruous country-squire layout made it a popular spot for wedding photos, and so there was a full bridal party standing by one of the reflecting pools, blowing on their hands to keep warm, while a couple of boys in suits who couldn't have been older than six chased each other around the still water. In fact, Adam was the only one in the whole garden not dressed formally. Still, Devon felt like the conspicuous one.

”So?” Adam said. ”Shall we go talk amongst the roses?”

”Why not,” Devon said. ”I'm sure everybody thinks we're f.a.gs anyway.”

They descended the steps and turned left on the flagstones toward the unoccupied reflecting pool. ”Miguel is out,” Devon said.

”No names, please.”

”Whatever. One of my a.s.sociates has told me he's out. The one who works at Schwab. He's getting married. He says he's made enough and doesn't want this hanging over his head anymore.”

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