Allison Pearson - I Don't Know How She Does It

THE SINATRA INN has the determined gaiety of a fading showgirl. Red-velvet booths line the walls; fifty years of elegant dining have rubbed shiny saddle sores in the scarlet plush. The back wall is given over to photographs of the local boy who made good (Frank came from Hoboken, just down the road). There is a picture of Sinatra with Lauren Bacall; Sinatra at a rakish angle with the Rat Pack; Sinatra standing at a piano, caught in a cone of light, his skinny tie at half mast, his neck straining for some long-lost note; and Sinatra with Ava Gardner in the fifties, him looking famished, her insatiable. I can never see those two together without imagining them in bed.

Each booth has its own mini jukebox where you put in your quarter and take your pick of Frank’s Greatest Hits. So many titles, so many featuring the word you . Jack Abelhammer and I choose the corner seat under the poster of Frank as Maggio in From Here to Eternity . To the waiter, an eager, harassed man with a lot of veal to get rid of, we must appear to be a regular couple having fun over the cocktail list. (“Witchcraft” looks evil, so I opt for “Night and Day.”) In fact, Jack and I are in trouble. Like returning astronauts, we are struggling to make the switch from the weightless world of e-mail, where you can say what you like and mean it or not mean it, to the real world where words, being earthed by gestures, by arms and lips and eyes, have their own specific gravity.

I have never seen Jack out of a suit before. The effect is only slightly less alarming than if he were entirely naked. I laugh and drink and laugh and feel a needle of doubt threading through me. I know Jack Abelhammer the way I know a fictional character. I need him to exist to make reality more bearable, not to complicate it.

“So, what’s it to be, signora?” Jack is examining the menu. “Veal with marsala, veal with mascarpone or veal with our delicious chopped veal. You don’t likea da veal? OK, so we have a very gooda scaloppine à la limone. ”

He slots a quarter into the jukebox, and his finger reaches out to press “Where or When.”

“No, not that one.”

“But it’s beautiful.”

“I’ll cry. When I heard Sinatra died I cried.”

“Hey, I love Frank too, but he was real old when he died. Why’d you cry?”

I’m not sure how much I want to tell this most familiar stranger, the version with the colorful character or the true story. My dad had a cache of Sinatra 78s he kept in the sideboard filed in their brown-paper sleeves in a big toast-rack thing. Julie and I were fascinated by them when we were kids. The brown paper smelled like old people, but the records themselves made everyone seem so young. They had that kind of ebony luster a cockroach has and a fabulous label in mauve with silver writing like an invitation to a ball. My father always did a great Sinatra impersonation at family get-togethers, standing on a table and spitting out “Schick-kargo, Schick-cargo, that toddlin’ town!” But the songs he liked best were the sad ones: “All the Way” and “Where or When.” “Frank’s the patron saint of unrequited love,” Dad said. “Will you listen to that voice, Katharine?”

“Kate?”

“Frank could make my parents happy,” I say, studying the menu. “Sinatra was always the truce music in our house. It was safe to come out if my dad put on ‘Come Fly with Me.’ I think I’ll try another cocktail instead of the veal. What d’you think would happen if you mixed ‘Love and Marriage’ with ‘Strangers in the Night’?”

Jack grabs the tip of the knife I am playing with, so we each have one end. “Nothing too terrible. Maybe a strange taste in the mouth. I’d say the worst was a bad case of remorse in the morning. What’s a bouncy castle?”

“What bouncy castle?”

“A bouncy castle. You have it written on your hand. I haven’t seen a girl write on her hand since fifth grade; Kate, you really should look into these great new things called diaries.”

I look down at the spider of Biro across my knuckle, a reminder about Emily’s birthday. So, here’s the rub: to tell him or not to tell him that I am a mother (surely, the only context in which this could be a shameful revelation).

“A bouncy castle is… it’s a blow-up castle you bounce on. For my daughter’s birthday party, I need to remind myself to hire one. I mean, it’s not for ages, but by the time I get round to remembering it’s usually too late.”

“You have a child?” He seems interested, not appalled.

“Two. Or so they tell me. I don’t see as much of them as I’d like. Emily will be six in June; she thinks she’s Sleeping Beauty. Ben was one in January and you can’t get him to stay still, he’s. . well, he’s a boy.”

Jack nods solemnly. “Amazing they’re still making us. Strictly, we men should have been phased out with the stegosaurus. But a few of us wanted to stick around and see what the place would be like when you were running it.”

“I’m not terribly good at being laughed at, Mr. Abelhammer.”

“That’ll be the German in you, Ms. Reddy.”

Later, after the veal — a flannel wrapped in a loofah of cheese — there is tiramisu, like shaving foam flecked with almonds. The food is so transcendentally terrible that we are already relishing the shared joke it will become. And then there is dancing, a lot of dancing. I seem to remember singing too, but that can’t be right. What kind of a state would I have to be in to sing in public?

“Still a voice within me keeps repeating, You You You.

Night and day you are the one,

Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.

Whether near to me or far,

It’s no matter darling where you are,

I think of you. Night and day.”

2:34 A.M.“Hello, Mummy! Mummy, come on, sleepyhead, it’s time to wake up now.”

Sit up in blind panic. Cover breasts with hands, then realize it’s dark. Emily? Here in New Jersey? Takes a few seconds to find the light switch, a few more to figure out the voice is coming from the alarm clock, the travel one with the recorded message that Emily gave me for Christmas. It must be getting-up time back in London. “Come on, Mummy, lazybones; you’ll be late.” Emily’s voice is tinged with pride in her assignment. When she’s bossy she sounds exactly like her mother.

Peer around the room for signs of adultery. My dress is on a hanger; shoes under the chair, underwear in a neat pile on top. Jack has carried me back, undressed me and put me to bed. Like a child. Suddenly, I think how unbearable it would have been if he’d been here when Emily’s voice sang out in the darkness, stopping us in our—

Oh, God, my head. Must get water. In bathroom, switch on light. Light like a drill. Switch off light. Drink one glass of water, then another. Not enough. Climb into shower with mouth open and let water gush in. On the way back to bed, I see that the top page of the hotel stationery has something on it. Switch on desk lamp:

“Some things that happen for the first time,

Seem to be happening again. .

But who knows where or when?”

Sleep well, love Jack

10:09 A.M. NEWARK AIRPORT.Plane is delayed forever. I am stretched out across a bank of seats in the Club Lounge. The fog outside the window is matched by impenetrable gloom inside my head. Think of last night while trying not to think of last night. Infidelity Reddy-style: all the guilt and none of the sex. Brilliant, Kate, just brilliant.

You get drunk with a client who carries you back to your hotel room, removes all your clothes and then politely takes his leave. Hard to know what to feel: outraged at the sexual invasion or mortified by the lack of it? Perhaps Abelhammer was repelled by nonmatching bra-brief combo or did he flee at sight of Reddy stomach which, after two pregnancies and an emergency cesarean, resembles one of her grandmother’s rice puddings — the top skin puckered over the granular slush beneath. One problem with being unconscious in presence of prospective lover is inability to pull belly button to spine as advised by personal trainer.