And beneath all that was the fact that he was still waiting for Nora’s Polaroids to arrive, that as soon as he’d gotten excited about this project, it had stalled out. He’d written her a nice note, sent the lawyer a carbon copy. Then separately, as promised, he sent some photos of the gallery space. And heard nothing. He’d messed up; he’d assumed her number was in the file, and now Cecily said she’d never had it, that they’d communicated entirely by mail. Information didn’t have it either. He wrote to Nora’s lawyer, asking if he’d heard from her, suggesting that he’d love her number. Stanley wrote back that he’d learned better than to bother Nora, but she was sure to be in touch. No number. Yale called Stanley, whose phone was on his letterhead, but the secretary said that since he was semiretired, he only worked some days, and no, she couldn’t predict which days, but she’d take a message. Yale called again, and she said she’d repeat the message. He was afraid of seeming pushy, of the lawyer telling Nora he had a bad feeling about those Northwestern folks.
And so, over the main course, while everyone else debated Live Aid, with which Asher had some arcane quibble, Yale brought Nora up with Fiona.
“Isn’t she incredible?” Fiona said. “I want to be her when I grow up. She had affairs with so many artists! Seriously.”
“You could run out and have sex with artists right now.”
“Oh, you know what I mean. She had this life, you know? She was the only one in the whole family who didn’t shut out Nico. She sent him a check for fifty dollars every month.” Nico hadn’t even needed to come out to her, Fiona said; Nora had known all along. But no, Fiona didn’t have her number. She’d seen her at a family wedding up in Wisconsin in August, and as they sat there talking about art, about Paris, that’s when Fiona had told her about Yale’s position, told Nora she should write to him soon. Nora had called her, she said, to say how much she liked Yale. “And she must love you,” she said, “because it’s the only time she’s ever called me.” Maybe her father would have the number. She promised she’d try to get it. Yale knew better than to expect follow-through.
Down the table, Terrence was talking about his new meditation practice, his crystals, his stress-relief cassettes, and Asher was laughing, shaking his head. “Listen,” Terrence said, “you keep figuring out how to save the world. I’m gonna work on buying myself a few extra months. If I have to eat the damn crystals, I’ll do it.”
Asher said, “I can tell you a couple other places you can put your crystals.”
Fiona punched his arm, hard enough that Asher winced. She told him to behave.
Fiona was the one who helped Yale clear the dishes, or at least held open the swinging door that separated the tiny kitchen from the apartment’s main room. The others migrated to the living room so Terrence could catch the second half of the Cowboys game.
Once the water was running, Yale lowered his voice. “Hey, did you tell Charlie I went upstairs with Teddy? After the memorial?”
“Oh! Oh God, Yale, I’ve been meaning to apologize.” She backed up to the counter and launched herself up to sit there, her feet dangling. “You know how you get surer of things when you’re drunk? I was drunk, and he couldn’t find you, and I’d seen you go upstairs, and someone else said they’d seen Teddy go upstairs, and I kept saying, ‘Yale is upstairs with Teddy,’ because I thought I was being helpful. I guess I wasn’t.”
“I thought so,” Yale said. “That’s what I thought. Teddy wasn’t even there. He left when the slide show started.”
“Oh Yale, I didn’t mean to make a problem. I heard later that Charlie was—oh, God.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s the least important thing about that night.”
Yale scraped the plates while Fiona joined everyone in the living room. If he didn’t do it now, while Charlie was busy entertaining and pretending to understand American football, then Charlie would insist on doing every dish.
When Yale finally walked into the living room, the conversation abruptly stopped. “What?” he said.
Charlie said, “I’ll tell you later.”
“No, what?”
“Cowboys are winning,” Terrence said.
Asher tried to drink from his glass, but his glass was empty.
“Just tell him,” Fiona said.
Charlie patted the couch, bit his lip, stared at the TV. “I thought I saw your mum.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, I did see her. She was a nurse, in—it was a Tylenol advert. She said some stuff. Not much.”
Asher said, “We didn’t know your mom was a movie star.”
He felt dizzy. “She’s not.”
This hadn’t happened in a couple of years, this kind of ambush. There was a commercial for Folgers Crystals a while back, in which she was a waitress. She’d been a receptionist for an episode of Simon & Simon. He hated it—which Charlie must have told them, or why were they looking at him like that?—hated, on a gut level, the humiliation of being afforded only the same two-second shots of his mother that the entire rest of the country was given. Hated that he needed to watch, that he couldn’t look away in indifference. Hated that he’d missed seeing her just now, hated that they’d all seen her without him, hated that they were pitying him, hated that he hated it all so much.
When Yale was seven his father had taken him to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s—and Yale, knowing his mother was an actress, and that actresses disguised themselves for their roles, became convinced that his mother was the one playing Holly Golightly. He wanted her to be the one singing “Moon River,” which seemed like just the sort of song his mother might sing to him if she were still around. He soon outgrew the fantasy, but for years, when he had trouble sleeping, he’d imagine Audrey Hepburn singing to him.
He said, “It’s nice to know she’s alive.”
He grabbed his legal pad from the shelf under the coffee table. He’d been drafting a letter for the Annual Fund that morning. He snatched up a pen and started circling things that didn’t need circling.
Fiona said, “Are you okay?”
He nodded, and as the game came back on, Charlie twisted one of Yale’s curls around his finger. Asher picked up the TV Guide and flipped through it as if they might change the channel at any moment.
And then the door buzzer sounded, thank God.
* * *
—
Teddy was alone. “Julian has as emergency rehearsal, whatever that means,” he said. “He sends his regrets. Oh my god, it smells amazing.” Teddy always talked like he’d just done a speedball, but it was just the way he was.