Jane Smiley - Early Warning

“Do not ride that thing,” said Ivy.

“What kind?” said Frank, pretending an interest.

Michael exclaimed, “Kawasaki 1000. It’s red.”

“Why am I not surprised,” said Ivy flatly.

Frank looked over at Richie, who was surveying the menu. No response.

Andy floated in, closing the flap of her handbag, glancing around, and only seeming to recognize them at the last moment. Frank cleared his throat in order to get the irritated look that he knew was there off his face, and stood up to kiss her on the cheek. She gave him a vaporous squeeze around the waist. She said, “I forgot how overdone this place is. But the food is nice.” Frank, who rather liked the darkness, the extreme red walls, and the samovars, as well as the velvet booths, knew she would order a salad. She looked at her children as if she couldn’t quite remember who they were, and sat down. Richie said to her, as if tattletaling, “Michael bought a big motorcycle.”

Andy turned her gaze on Michael, and Michael met her look with a challenging stare of his own, but she didn’t say anything, leaving that up to Frank. Frank said, “Have you ever ridden a motorcycle?”

“Yesss,” said Michael, evidently annoyed. “You sit up, look where you are going, and—”

“Hope for the best,” said Loretta, who then rolled her eyes. But she smiled. Frank had noticed that, as long as Michael didn’t drink and spoke highly of Ronald Reagan, she didn’t criticize him.

“Let’s stop talking about the motorcycle,” said Michael. Just then the waiter appeared and handed around the menus. Frank said, “The caviar is always good here.”

There was an empty chair, as if for Jesse. Frank stared at it, stopped staring at it, then signaled the waiter, who took it away.

Richie grinned, and Michael said, “It is, it is.” Even Andy raised her eyebrows in pleasure. “Beluga! So delicious.”

The serving of beluga came mounded in a little bowl set in ice, surrounded by other little bowls with blini, hard-boiled eggs, chopped onions, sour cream. Ivy, who considered herself the caviar expert, promptly placed a little dab of each ingredient on one of the thin circular pancakes, folded it, and ate it. She said, “You have to use this spoon. It’s mother-of-pearl. You can’t use any kind of metal.”

Frank watched them — Andy taking maybe two eggs, Loretta patting her belly and shaking her head, Richie topping Ivy, and Michael topping Richie. But there was plenty. One letter Jesse had sent him in the summer mentioned that a guy from over in Muscatine gave him some catfish roe. Lois fried it up. Jesse, he thought, should be here, should be having this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Frank let Ivy make him a serving with everything on it while he pulled himself together — the chair was gone, but there was still a space where it had been — and said, “You know, six months before the Iranian Revolution — when was that, spring of ’78—we got invited to the Iranian Consulate; remember that, Andy? That was the only time I’ve ever seen beluga in bowls like salad.”

“I do remember that,” said Andy, as if doing so surprised even her. Frank ate his serving. What he remembered about that party, more than the caviar, was standing near one of the windows and being revisited by a feeling from that trip he took for Arthur to Iran; at the sight of buzzards feasting in the moonlight on some carcass, say a goat, he had known all of a sudden how little intervened between the hot breeze on that runway and death itself. Death had shimmered in the air — as close as his next breath — and in that satin-draped consulate, looking out on Sixty-ninth Street, he had felt that once again. Now, he thought, right now, at the Russian Tea Room, it was even closer, if still beyond the boundary. The thought made his hand resting on the table look vivid, still, pale like marble.

Dinner was uneventful, except that, after Richie ate his lobster salad with evident enjoyment, Michael said, “Did you see him lick the plate?” and laughed, joined by Loretta. Ivy said, “Since you picked up your plate and licked the whole surface the last time we were at your place, it must be in the genes.”

Richie laughed.

Andy looked at Frank. Frank knew she was thinking that the two girls caused bad blood, or worse blood, between Richie and Michael. Frank did not agree: he thought the boys could not resist egging each other on, and would do it with or without Ivy and Loretta. But look at them, they were doing well. Michael and Loretta had bought a co-op on Seventy-eighth Street, between Madison and Fifth. Rubino said Richie was good at real estate, but he had a plan for something bigger and “more helpful.” Income-wise, they were about neck and neck — Michael stopped having Social Security taken out of his paycheck sometime in August, and Richie sometime in September. Loretta, of course, contributed more from her trust fund than Ivy did from her job, but that didn’t mean much, given Ivy’s dedication.

Jesse. Jesse. Well, he wasn’t worth what he had been two years before, but he was worth more than either of the twins — Frank did not look forward to the time when Michael, anyway, and maybe Richie, found that out. But because of that vibrating current that stretched between him, here, and Jesse, there, all of this was fine with him. He was alive and not divorced. Michael was not dead or in prison; Richie had come to terms with Michael by letting Loretta and Ivy take over. Janet had escaped that Peoples Temple psycho apparently unscathed. If someone had told him forty years ago that he could feel relief in all the imperfections of his life, that he could derive some sense of pleasure from a bad marriage, disappointing children, a faltering career, an array of physical aches and pains, and an intermittent correspondence with his brother’s son, he would have punched that person in the nose. But here it was again: once he identified a single thing in this world that he actually wanted — Lydia, Jesse — that very thing slipped away. He suspected that Andy would say he had no capacity for love. Only Frank knew that this wasn’t true. He swallowed, then said, “Normally, I wouldn’t suggest this, but how about some tea? It’s worth it here, just to see them make it.”

“Mint would be good,” said Loretta, patting her belly.

HALF ASLEEP, Janet saw that face again — a black man in a doctor’s scrubs, striding down the hospital corridor, tossing off some medical terms as if he knew what they meant. She sat up with a cry that made Jared turn over and ask her what was going on: was Emily okay?

Janet said, “I’ll see,” and snaked out of bed, wide awake. Emily, of course, was fine. Janet stood in the darkness outside of Emily’s room and tried to stop shaking. That it was Lucas was impossible. Lucas was dead; even Marla agreed that he was dead. The worst part was that she could not remember which show it was. She had been clicking through to MTV, hoping for a Pat Benatar or a Blondie video — Emily loved to dance around the living room to “Heart of Glass.”

Two days of exploring, and she saw him again — he had a pretty good part on the soap, but not a lead. There was also a black nurse, who would probably end up his girlfriend but wasn’t paying much attention to him yet. She gathered that “Dr. Thompson” was a new character.

She wrote to Marla, but Marla knew nothing. In Paris, Marla had thought Janet and Lucas had both gone to Guyana. When she heard from Janet the first time (gosh, two years ago now), she was so happy to hear from her — and that she was alive — but she wrote that she hadn’t dared ask about Lucas, because Janet hadn’t mentioned him. Now that she was in New York, they wrote from time to time, but never about Lucas.