Cathleen Schine - The Three Weissmanns of Westport

"What do you do now that you're retired?" she forced herself to ask. "Or, I should say, semiretired?"

"Fish."

"Really? Fish has become so stressful."

He gave her a perturbed look. Has they? he wanted to ask.

"Ordering it, I mean."

"Ah. It."

"Aren't you worried about global warming and overfishing and mercury?"

"Oh, I never catch any."

After this, the conversation refused to take even one more ungainly step, and Miranda, defeated, turned to the person on her other side, her cousin Rosalyn.

"You must be very bored in our quiet little town," Rosalyn said. She had seen Miranda trudging back from heaven could only guess where with an armful of weeds, a great, tendriled burst of them, surely crawling with bees and ticks, which Miranda then brought up to the house and offered as a bouquet. Rosalyn, who had a horror of Lyme disease, made sure they were thrown away as soon as Miranda departed. Still, it was sweet of her, in her thoughtless, careless way. Poor Miranda. She had to fill up her time somehow after her unfortunate professional downfall. What a scandal that had turned out to be. It was all over The New York Times, though it was really just an insular publishing scandal, after all. Nothing for Miranda to get on her high horse about, even with that piece about it in Vanity Fair.

Rosalyn had thanked dear Miranda for the buggy weedy bouquets she brought, offering les bise with just the right show of warmth-neither too much nor too little. Just because someone was down and out did not mean they should be treated coldly. On the other hand, she could not help thinking that it was inconsiderate of Lou to place his cousin next to her when there was such an interesting woman at the other end of the table, a reporter, younger than Miranda, still in her prime, really, someone at the top of her game professionally, rather than on the way down. Well, she supposed someone had to talk to Miranda. It might as well be the poor hostess. Unpleasant things usually did fall to the hostess. "Very bored after all the excitement of…" Rosalyn paused. She had been about to say "of your past life." But Miranda was not dead. She had not even officially retired. She was just washed up. How did one say that politely? She decided on "… the excitement of big city life."

Miranda was gazing in fascination at Rosalyn's hair. Newly tinted a rusty red, it was a work of art, an edifice so delicately, elaborately wrought it took her breath away. How could she possibly be bored with such a hairdo to contemplate?

"You seem to have so much spare time," Rosalyn was saying. "I envy you!" she added, feeling in truth only a soft, snug pity.

"Yes, there are so many new things to see here." Miranda tried to look Rosalyn in the eyes rather than staring at the taut curved wall of hair rising above her ear. "Richard Serra," she added softly. Rosalyn's marvelous hair looked like a Richard Serra sculpture. Even the color.

"No, I don't think he lives here in town. Though, of course, Westport has always been such an artistic place."

When Betty last lived in Westport, there had been a butcher downtown with sawdust on his floor and a cardboard cutout of a pig in his window. There had been a five-and-dime, too. Woolworth's? No, Greenberg's, she remembered now. That was more than forty years ago, yet she felt that if she turned her head quickly enough she might still catch a glimpse of the store's wooden bins filled with buttons and rickrack, of the Buster Brown shoe store next door to it. When she looked at the bank now, she saw the Town Hall it had been. The Starbucks had been the town library, the Y the firehouse. The memories appeared like visions. They laid themselves out like a path to the past. But really they were just a path that led, inevitably, to this moment: Betty Weissmann driving through a town she had long ago deserted, without the man who had deserted her. That's what Betty thought as she parked behind Main Street, facing the river. Her memories all led her here: a parking lot, lucky to get a space.

She got out of the car and locked it. In the days when she had been here with Joseph, she had never had to lock the car. She blamed him for this. It had become her habit to blame him for so many things. That's what you get, Joseph-unfair and extravagant blame. A small price to pay for jettisoning your wife, for chucking her out to spin helplessly in the dark, infinite sky of elderly divorce.

A spurned woman has to look her very best when the spurned woman goes into the city to meet with the man by whom she has been spurned. Not to mention the lawyers who helped him. For this reason, Betty decided to buy a silk sweater at Brooks Brothers and a pair of gold knotted earrings at Tiffany's. Her credit cards were useless, thank you, Joseph, but Annie had added Betty onto her Visa for emergencies, and if this wasn't an emergency, what was? Then Betty bought a suit-ideal for a meeting with lawyers, elegant and dignified-at a large store full of overpriced well-made fashionable clothing. She remembered it as, in decades past, a nondescript men's shop. The store had prospered, and the suit she bought there, extremely expensive, was for those who had prospered along with it. She was not supposed to buy clothes like this anymore. But spurned women, like beggars, could not be choosers. No one could object to this girding of her loins, she thought, anticipating Annie's voice doing exactly that.

Betty took the train in. When the conductor punched holes in her ticket, she found the old-fashioned mechanical click comforting. The train was creaky, the window bleary. The drive into the city was just too much for her these days. Left cataract needed to be taken care of; she would have to get to that. Right now, it was important to get her hair done. She'd left herself plenty of time. Annie said she would have to stop going to Frederic Fekkai, but Annie, in spite of what Annie thought, was not always right.

Her lawyer met her downstairs. He was very solicitous, she noticed. A slight young man with short curly hair of a nondescript mousy brown. He looked like a mouse altogether, his features small and pointed, his little feet in their little shoes. Only his eyes were wrong. They were pale gray, not mouselike at all. How could this young, pale-eyed mouse, his hair so sad and unimportant, possibly do battle with Joseph, who in his efficient businesslike way had very little hair at all?

She sat at the edge of the dark pond that was the conference table. Across the pond sat Joseph. How impatient he must be. He disliked lawyers, he disliked formalities.

"Please sit down, Mrs. Weissmann," said Joseph's lawyer.

Yes, she thought, Mrs. Weissmann. Do you hear that, Mr. Weissmann?

She noticed he was wearing new cuff links. That, more than anything the lawyers said, more even than Joseph's coldness and distance, made her sad. Things were happening to Joseph and they were happening without her. Cuff links, barbells made of yellow gold, were happening to him.

"My client is a generous man," Joseph's lawyer was saying.

"My client is a reasonable woman," her lawyer was saying.

Joseph's eyes met hers, and in the fraction of an instant before they flicked away, she knew they shared the same amused, unhappy thought: Both our lawyers are liars.

The months of struggling against the ruin of her business had taken a toll on Miranda. She had phoned and cajoled and browbeaten and pleaded. She had called in every chit. But there was the stink of failure clinging to the Miranda Weissmann Literary Agency, and neither authors nor editors liked that odor much. No matter what she did or said, she could not seem to keep everything she'd worked so hard to build from washing away like sand beneath her feet.

The appearance on Oprah had been the final humiliation. Miranda was defeated at last, and she was exhausted. So perhaps what happened to her was inevitable, especially while she was living in the same house with her sister and mother, eating her mother's cooking, listening to her sister's indolent scolding. Or was it obligatory for someone about to turn fifty? Maybe it was a simple case of pent-up energy-she was not someone who liked to stand still, even if that meant spinning in circles. Whatever the reason, Miranda found herself embracing a new, a second, a rediscovered adolescence. Because her first adolescence, the stormy drama of which she had rather enjoyed, had been marked by a resolution to, whenever possible, examine her soul, Miranda decided in this new iteration to reexamine her soul. It was possible that this time, at least, she might get results.