Riverside Drive

Amanda, Nana noted, was the only one oblivious to her new body. The gardener had taken to trailing around after her; the groom smiled in a most inappropriate way when he insisted on giving Amanda a leg up on her horse; even Randolph, the butler—who was at least as old as Nana—could be seen gazing elsewhere than at the gravy he was supposed to be serving.

If Amanda gained any permanent knowledge from her “stabilization” at Fowles Farm, it was Nana’s opinion of the saving graces and potential downfalls of her heritage. Amanda loved Fowles Farm because, Nana said, her Fowles blood responded to it. Amanda’s thinness, her five-eight height, her light brown hair (and its straightness), her nose, her straight white teeth, her strong jaw line and her long arms and legs were all Fowles. As for the shape of her eyes, their strange shade of hazel, those long lashes, that mouth, and the “overendowment” (referring to her chest), they all—sigh—clearly came from the Millers (said with the same emphasis as murderers).

Mr. Hammer pounded enough mathematics into Amanda’s head—right up to the door of the examination room in Baltimore—for her to score a 560 on the SAT. As for the English part, if the examiners had taken her essay on “What George Orwell Would Think of the Design of This Test” into consideration, surely Amanda would have scored higher than her 800.

Amanda went to Amherst on the strength of her desire to attend school with Emily Dickinson’s ghost. She enjoyed school very much and felt at home around the English department. She also made great friends with the curator of the Dickinson house. As for her contemporaries, everyone liked her—and some even admired her—but always from a distance. She was, in their words, “just sooo weird.”

In her senior year Nana died. It became campus news that Amanda had inherited some four million dollars. And it was right around then that Christopher Gain appeared on her doorstep—literally. She was dressed in billowing white, just departing from her cottage to visit the curator. Christopher was dressed like Zorro. He bowed, deeply, his hat in hand, swept his cape to the side and offered her his hand. The girls roared from the windows above, but after Amanda smiled pleasantly at them, she turned to Christopher and took his hand.

Christopher had graduated some years before from Dartmouth. Since that time he had been hanging out at Amherst, discussing his future as a brilliant writer with various gorgeous coeds. He himself had gorgeous blond looks, tremendous charm and appeal, and a three-hundred-year-old pedigree.

Amanda found Christopher slightly magical. Sitting on the grass outside Emily’s house, in the dark of the night, he cited poem after poem that the great lady had written. While Amanda noticed that he kept bending the emphasis to imply that Emily had been writing to some lover hiding beneath her bed, rather than to her universal lover in the heavens above, she enjoyed the performance immensely. And then, offering his hand to her again, he had led her behind some trees. He spread his cloak, gently helped her down, and then gracefully, gently, laid himself down on top of her.

Amanda marveled aloud at the way Christopher touched her. What he was doing, what it felt like—what she did not know it felt like. But it felt wonderful, she said, over and over. Amanda said a lot of things. In fact, she rendered a verbal narrative description of everything Christopher was doing to her—as he did it to her—as if it would help her to remember it all.

Amanda had never been touched that way before. Amanda had never been so much as kissed on the mouth before. Amanda was introduced to earthly delights beyond her comprehension. It wasn’t like Mr. Hammer’s mathematics—but it was very much like reading, she thought. It was taking her somewhere quite far away, somewhere quite different from the places she had been—inside of her? outside of her? where?—and she had the feeling that, yes, like reading, she would not fully understand it until she reached the end of what Christopher had to share with her.

They married three weeks after her graduation and moved to Florence. For two years Amanda and Christopher read and played and talked and dressed and drifted and reveled in Italy. They also spent hours making love.

At night, Christopher would go off alone to the cafés to think about his novel. Amanda preferred to stay home, reading and writing, playing records on the stereo, and acting out plays that had no beginnings and no endings….

Amanda’s first brush with reality struck when Christopher said he couldn’t have sex with her because he had herpes. Had what? Christopher took her to the doctor with him, where it was carefully explained to her that she was lucky not to have caught it. But what was it? How did one catch such a dreadful thing? Did it have something to do with the water here?

The doctor explained.

Christopher said it happened one night, late, when he was so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing. It would never happen again. And soon he would be well, he was sure, and then— “oh, darling, do you know what I’m going to do to you?”

On Christopher’s inspiration, the couple moved to New York City in 1978, renting an apartment on 73rd Street between Fifth and Madison avenues. Two weeks after they arrived, Amanda came home from registration at Columbia University to find a young man named Marco wandering around in her kitchen with a towel around his waist.

It took almost six months for it to penetrate, but Reality Part II visited Amanda. Christopher, by his own admission, was bisexual. For Amanda, this information did seem like Mr. Hammer’s mathematics. Not until Christopher persistently pounded it into her head was she able to glean what it was he was talking about. (“But I don’t understand, how can this be?” “It just is, Amanda.” “Is what?” “Like it is between you and me.” “But he’s not like me—how could it be like us?”)

Amanda took her furrowed brow to Columbia to concentrate on an MFA in their creative writing program. It didn’t work. With each passing day she and Christopher were splitting apart. Their sex life broke down completely and Amanda, for the first time in her life, felt terribly lonely. She stopped writing, she could scarcely read, she could not act out plays of any kind. After a while, not even the huge mirror of the wardrobe could evoke a line from her. Her costumes hung in the closets; her attire died into jeans, the denim growing looser, her blouses growing baggier. She dropped out of graduate school.

In 1979, Tinker and Reuben surprised the Gainses by arriving in New York to see them. (It was the first time they had actually made it.) The Millers were frightened by the change in their daughter. They were also stunned by Christopher, who, last time they had seen him, had not being sailing in and out of the house in silk pajamas. And there was something else—something Tinker had to talk about in private with Amanda.

Tinker didn’t mean to pry, but Nana’s lawyer, Mr. Osborne—did Amanda remember Mr. Osborne at the reading of the will? Amanda did—told her that the Gainses had spent some four hundred thousand dollars in the last eight months. Mr. Osborne—who only had Amanda’s best interests at heart—said three hundred and forty thousand of that money had flowed through Christopher. Did Amanda know that? Was, perhaps, Christopher starting a business?

When Amanda sank down in her chair and started playing with her hair, Tinker had called her husband in. Together, standing before her, holding hands, the Millers gently suggested to their daughter that she might want to see a doctor…perhaps she and Christopher together.

Christopher, no…but yes, Amanda would see the doctor.

Amanda had been in therapy for five months when she flew up to Syracuse for a visit. Her parents were encouraged by the change in her. (Though, they sighed in secret, she was not their Amanda anymore, was she?) There were papers to be signed with Mr. Osborne, money matters to be rearranged. Amanda wasn’t sure what all the papers meant (a Mr. Osborne was not of much value without a Mr. Hammer), but she agreed that it would be a good idea to curtail Christopher’s access to her money.

When Amanda came home—on that fateful Saturday evening—she found her home in a full-swing party, the majority of the guests being what are sometimes described as “screaming queens.” Her husband, Christopher, was the loudest. Wearing a little fig leaf. And in the dining room, among the bottles of booze and piles of joints, Amanda saw an array of pills and powders and needles and razors and a mirror, and a burner was scorching the finish off of Nana’s table and—

Amanda moved into the Plaza Hotel—where, she remembered, her earliest literary heroine, Eloise, lived—and asked Mr. Osborne to handle her divorce.

Amanda settled fifty thousand dollars on Christopher, though Mr. Osborne told her she certainly didn’t owe him a thing. Amanda thought she did though.

She bought the apartment on Riverside Drive at once. From the ground looking up, she thought her building looked like a castle. And her apartment, on the top floor, came complete with a tower room. She flew down to Baltimore, tagged furniture that was in storage from Fowles Farm, and had it shipped to her new home. In time, Amanda started riding in Central Park, and then her reading resumed, and her writing resumed, and then her talking to herself resumed. But the plays never came back, nor did her costumes ever leave the closet.

The idea of writing a novel from the perspective of Catherine the Great had originated in Florence. After having read and digested some three hundred tomes of Russian and European history over the years, in the fall of 1981 Amanda finally sat down and wrote the first line of the book. “I, Catherine, Imperial Empress of Russia, answer to no man.”

“He’s gone,” Rosanne said, coming back into the writing room. She stared at Amanda for a moment and then abruptly turned away. “Uh, ya better…”

Amanda was confused. But then she looked down at herself and saw the state of her dress, of her undress, of her half undress. She pulled the dress down over her thighs and smoothed it. She brushed back her hair with her hands and felt the absence of an earring. Amanda rubbed her face, dropped her hands and sat back against the window. She sighed. “I am utterly at a loss as to what to say to you—except, thank you.”

Exhibiting caution, Rosanne slowly brought her eyes back around. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. She swung her weight onto one leg and brought up her hand to the opposite hip. “Look, Amanda,” she said, looking down at the floor, “it’s none of my business—and it’s not none of Mrs. G’s either—” She looked up.

Amanda covered her mouth and coughed.

“Don’t get mad—”

Amanda crossed her arms over her chest, sighing.

“I think you’re great,” Rosanne said.

Amanda was looking confused again.

“And Mrs. G thinks so too, and we just kinda worry about ya. I mean, it’s not like we think anything’s wrong with that guy or nothin’,” she rushed on, “it’s just we wish you were a little happier.”

Amanda nodded slightly, lowering her eyes. “Thank you for your concern, Rosanne,” she murmured.

“You’re not mad or nothin’—vexed, are ya?”

Amanda raised her eyes, shaking her head. “Of course not,” she said.

“Okay then. Well, I better be goin’,” Rosanne said, moving toward the door. “Oh, man, I almost forgot to tell ya.” She spun around. “Amanda, I think Howie wants to read your book.”

Amanda blinked.

“Howie—you know, Mondays, Howard Stewart. The editor.” Rosanne waved her arm in the air to make sure Amanda was paying attention. “Listen, okay?”

“I’m listening,” Amanda said.

“Now don’t go gettin’ freaky, but he was really interested in your book. I told him it wasn’t finished or nothin’, and I told him it was kinda long—”

“Long,” Amanda repeated, looking at the shelves that were Catherine.

“So is it okay if he calls you or somethin’?”

Amanda looked at her, hesitating.

“He’s really the greatest guy,” Rosanne said. “Just talk to him, will ya? You know, like he’s an editor. And he won’t push ya about it, he isn’t pushy at all.” She nodded her head vigorously. “Just say yes, Amanda.”

Amanda lowered her arms to her sides, sighed and said, “Yes.”

“Great!” Rosanne said, leaving the room. “See ya next week!”

Amanda covered her face with her hands. I nearly had sex in front of the cleaning woman, she imagined herself saying to Dr. Vanderkeaton.

It had started with the apartment on Riverside Drive. This sex thing had. One man on Mondays and never one that she could even remotely like. For the last eight months it had been Roger, and Rosanne and Mrs. Goldblum had known about him only because Roger had forever been stopping in to try his luck. (“Mondays,” Amanda would hiss at the door, with Rosanne lurking dangerously close by, “I have told you repeatedly. Every other Monday at one o’clock.”

“Yesterday was Monday,” Roger would hiss back, trying to grab hold of her, “and I came back to finish up.” “Mrs. G told me to tell ya,” Rosanne would say, coming out into the foyer, “that she hopes you’ll invite your visitor to join you guys for tea.” And the confounded dolt had said, “Love to!” no less than six times.)

In the beginning, five years ago, it had worked. Sex had pushed something back into place for Amanda. After one of those Monday afternoons something would temporarily subside inside of her—that awful, gnawing sensation that her moorings were fraying to the snapping point. But, over time, it had stopped working that way, leaving Amanda only to agonize over what seemed like some sort of curse on her body. On her.

She still ran into Christopher on occasion. Once at F.A.O. Schwarz, once at Lincoln Center, twice on the terrace outside the Stanhope and, most recently, in the Whitney Museum. She had been alone; Christopher was never alone.

Each time she saw him—and most strongly this last time—Amanda felt weak at the sight of how unattractive he had become. His hair was thinning almost too fast to be normal; he had lost far too much weight; his muscle tone was gone; and his teeth showed nicotine stains when he smiled at her. His eyes, too, had lost their luster. And Christopher was losing his—his maleness, too.

Looking at him made Amanda feel queasy and disoriented. This was the man who had commanded such love and desire from her? This was her Christopher?

Amanda lowered her hands from her face and looked at the shelves of Catherine that made up one wall of the writing room. There was her work, yes. There was that. And maybe…maybe it was time to do something about it. What had Rosanne said? Something about an editor wanting to read it?

The thought made her feel cold and scared and so she banished it.

She walked over to the desk, sat down, and pulled the telephone toward her. She looked at it a moment, lifted the receiver, and pushed the button marked “in house.”

“Yes, Peter, is that you? It is Amanda Miller calling…. Fine, thank you, and you?…I’m very glad to hear it. Peter, the reason why I am calling is to say that under no circumstances is Mr. Slats to be granted entry into this building…. That is correct—don’t let him in…. Exactly. Not now, not ever.”

4

The Wyatts

“You are different, Althea, and I’ll tell you how,” Sam Wyatt said to his daughter, voice rising. “You’ve got a nice home, a family that loves you and the best damn education money can buy. The question is, are you going to do anything with it?”

“Mom,” Althea said, looking to her mother.

Sam slammed the Times down on the breakfast table.

“Don’t,” his wife said softly, placing a hand on his arm.

“You talk to her,” Sam said, jerking the paper back up.

Harriet lowered her head slightly, took a long breath, and then looked at her daughter. Althea was standing there, arms rigid with anger. “Honey,” she said, “if you had the money to go on your own, it would be a different matter. But you don’t, and since your father doesn’t agree with you that it’s a good trip to make, you can hardly be furious with him for not giving you the money.”

“I’m eighteen,” Althea began.

The Times came crashing down. “Yeah,” her father said, “so maybe if you’re old enough to want to go palling around with Muffy, Scruffy and Whupsie—the Honky Sisters—you’re old enough to support yourself.”

“Oh, Dad,” Althea said, storming into the kitchen.

The Times was thrown to the floor. “What is it with that girl?” he said, yanking first one shirt cuff down over his wrist and then the other.

Harriet was eating her scrambled eggs.

“If I had the advantages she has—”

“You didn’t,” Harriet said.

“You better believe it.”

“I know, Sam.”

It was even odds whether the man named Sam Wyatt would explode or deflate at this point. His wife, sitting next to him, chewing, watched to see which it would be. When he fell back into his chair with a sigh, a faint smile passed over her lips and she moved on to her English muffin.

Sam took a deep breath, straightened his tie and then paid serious attention to his tie clip. “I don’t want her to get hurt,” he said quietly.

“I know, honey,” his wife said.

He let go of his tie clip, plunked his arms down on the arms of the chair, and looked at himself in the dining-room mirror. He straightened his tie again.

At fifty, Sam Wyatt possessed a handsomeness that was not easily defined. He was one of those men whose looks came alive with expression, animation, and since he was forever—as his eldest daughter would say—”intense,” he was most often rather striking. He was tall, nearly six foot one, and squarely made across the shoulders. His skin was a deep, ebony black, and his closely cut hair had gray coming in fast at the sides. His mouth—perfectly fine when still—had a curious habit of lifting to the right side when in use. (Four years ago, when Sam brought home a publicity photograph of himself from the office, three year-old Samantha had burst into tears. “That’s not Daddy!” The Wyatts had finally pieced together that what was scaring Samantha was the absence of “Daddy’s cook-ked smile.”) Sam’s nose was long and a tad sharp (“Where do you suppose that came from?” Althea would ask, pulling on it). And his eyes were large and bright, veiled by long lashes.

“Sam,” his wife said, lowering her English muffin, “is there something else? Something other than Althea, I mean.”

Sam thought for a moment and then sat back up to the table. “Would you want to go to Southampton with a bunch of white girls?”

“Not particularly,” Harriet said, pulling the bit of muffin into small pieces on her plate, “but then, I’m not Althea. And they’re nice girls, Sam, and I know she wouldn’t have been invited unless they really wanted her to go. And it’s preseason—” She frowned as Sam started humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; she picked up a piece of the muffin and bounced it off his nose. “You’re worse than a weather vane,” she said. “Make up your mind, are you in a good mood or a bad mood?”

“Yeah, I’d like that—weather reports,” Rosanne said, swinging in from the kitchen with a coffeepot. “Nobody told me hurricane Althea was gonna tear up the kitchen this mornin’.”

“What is she doing?” Harriet asked.

“Aw, nothin’,” Rosanne said, putting the coffee down on the table, “she’s okay. Killed the last muffin, though. I think it’s behind the refrigerator.”

Harriet giggled and the sound of it made both Sam and Rosanne smile. Harriet Wyatt was one of those lucky women who in her forties had gained ten pounds and a rather astonishing new voluptuousness. But her black hair—straightened and coiffed in a stunning sleek cut around her neck—her spring suit and silk blouse and her gold hoop earrings and bracelets did nothing by way of indicating that she could be a woman who giggled. But that was Harriet, forever coming forth with warm and happy surprises. That is, unless she thought one was wrong, and then she would grow ten feet tall (it would seem to Sam) and everything about Harriet would turn hard with the warning, “Just try and mess with me.”

“Can’t imagine where she gets her temper from,” Harriet said.

“Yeah,” Rosanne said, going around Sam’s chair to pick up the newspaper from the floor. “Here, Mr. W, let’s set an example,” she said, refolding it and placing it at his side.

Sam gave her a look out of the corner of his eye (with the side of his mouth rising accordingly) and then reached for the coffee.

“I wanted to ask ya somethin’, Mrs. W,” Rosanne said, moving back around the table.

“Coffee, Harriet?” Sam asked.

She nodded and turned to Rosanne. “Shoot.”

“Like, well,” Rosanne said, rolling up her sleeves, “Howie’s a good editor, isn’t he?”

Both Harriet and Sam burst out laughing.

“What? What?” Rosanne wanted to know, looking at one and then the other.

“I knew it!” Sam cried. “Harriet, I told you she’s going to write a book about us. Remember?”

“I’m not writin’ a book,” Rosanne declared, stamping her foot. “But let me tell ya, if I was”—she poked Sam in the shoulder— “I wouldn’t waste it on the likes of you. I got a lot more interestin’ things to write about than you two spoonies.”

“Hear that, Harriet?” Sam said. “She says we’re too boring.”

“Then thank God for boring,” Harriet said to the skies above. She looked back at Rosanne, smiling. “Howard is a very good editor.”

“I thought so,” Rosanne said, starting to clear the dishes. “He’s gonna read a friend of mine’s book.”

Sam’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t say anything.

“Sam,” Harriet said, sipping her coffee, “I’m supposed to have a meeting this morning with Harrison.”

He nodded, but then, after hesitating a moment, said, “I wanted to talk some more about that job offer.”

“Aw, no,” Rosanne said, balancing the pile of dirty dishes, “you’re not gonna leave, are ya?”

Harriet reached out to touch Rosanne’s arm. “I’m only thinking about it, Rosanne, so please don’t mention it to Howard.”

“Naw, I won’t,” Rosanne promised, going out to the kitchen. “He’s down in the dumps enough as it is.”

“We all are,” Harriet sighed. “The place is a battlefield.”

Sam was sitting there, stirring his coffee. “How long do you have before you have to give them a decision?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A couple of weeks, I guess.” She looked at him. “Why?”

“Well,” Sam said, slowly putting his spoon down on the saucer, “I wish you could put it off for a little while.”

“Why?” she said again, clearly puzzled.

“Well, with summer coming—I don’t know,” he mumbled, shaking his head.

Harriet was frowning. “I don’t understand. On Sunday you were all for it. As I recall, your exact words were, ‘It’s time one of us took a risk—go for it.’”

He sighed, sitting back in his chair. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m not so sure you want to leave—”

“What are you talking about, Sam? Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said to you for the last year? It’s—”

Seven-year-old Samantha chose that moment to come in and announce a crisis concerning a missing blue sock.

“I’ll help you, honey,” Harriet said, rising from her chair. “Sam,” she added on her way by him, “I want to talk about this some more tonight.”

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Sam mumbled.

Harriet stopped in her tracks and turned around. Finally, her husband looked at her. She started to say something, stopped, squinted slightly, and then said, “We do have to talk, Sam. We do.”

“I don’t know where it is!” Samantha wailed from the hall.

“Did you hear me, Sam?”

He nodded, tossing his napkin on the table.

“Honey,” Harriet said, coming back to him.

“I know, I know,” he said, lifting the jacket of his suit from the back of the chair. “We’ll talk tonight.”

As Harriet went in one direction, Althea came in from the other. She avoided her father’s eyes, intending to pass him by, but he caught hold of her arm. “Hey,” he said, pulling her back to face him.