Temporary Insanity Read online

  The partners at Newter & Spade kept their associates on a short lead. Sometimes there was a reason for it—if there was a deadline approaching or a case had taken a surprise turn that needed to be responded to immediately—but the rest of the time, it seemed to me, as an outside observer, that it was more of a power trip or a control issue than anything else. As long as Bart Harrison gave him his head and we had time to be together, Eric and I enjoyed considerable quality time exploring New York City’s vast cultural resources, enabling me to catch up on the museums I’d always intended to visit, the first-run movies I’d heretofore waited to see on DVD, the Broadway and Off-Broadway shows I couldn’t often afford to attend, plus a couple more Yankee games. He even got me into a bowling alley once—and I am not a girl who wears rented shoes.

  “What does your friend like to eat?” Gram asked. She was puttering around the kitchen in a much-loved and well-worn kimono, fluttering the butterfly extensions of her sleeves far too close to the open flames of the gas range. I warned her for about the thousandth time in recent memory about the potential hazards of her lounging wardrobe, which also included a pair of precipitously high platform mules that were constantly sloshing off her feet. The fact that she hadn’t fallen and twisted her ankle by now was a minor miracle.

  “You shouldn’t have to cook dinner for my…boyfriend.” I tasted the word in my mouth. It was the first time I’d spoken it aloud with reference to Eric Witherspoon.

  Hmm. Not bad. Not bad at all.

  “I’ll do it, Gram. Besides, it’ll give me a chance to show off my culinary skills.” In all the weeks we’d been a couple, I’d never cooked for him before. And since Eric had admitted on more than one occasion that his skills in the kitchen didn’t run any further than nuking a bowl of instant oatmeal, our comestible relationship thus far, when we weren’t dining out at nice restaurants, had consisted primarily of take-out Chinese or pizza.

  “He likes chicken. Beef. Anything. I don’t know. We can surprise him or I can ask him point-blank. We’ve got three whole days to devise a menu. What about chicken paprikash?” I asked Gram.

  “Is he watching his cholesterol? There’s an awful lot of sour cream in the sauce.” She shrugged. “Whatever you do is fine with me and it’ll taste wonderful.” She sounded less than enthusiastic. I watched her remove a pot of spaghetti from the stove and drain the pasta without turning off the gas. The voluminous sleeves on her robe were barely an inch from immolating her. I reached past her and turned the knob to the off position. “Gram, you really have to watch that! Please.” It was my umpteenth-and-first admonition.

  “I’m fine, Alice,” Gram replied testily. “You don’t need to mother-hen me.”

  But I felt otherwise. Gram’s increasing lack of attention to things like the dangers of an open flame concerned me greatly. There were days when I was afraid to leave her alone, and yet I had to go to work and continue to live the life of a responsible, independent adult. I wanted to be there to prevent accidents from occurring, yet I couldn’t be her full-time nurse.

  It’s a painful and difficult thing to watch someone you love cope with the problems of aging. It must be a zillion times more painful for them. As much as her kimono sleeves and platform shoes made me anxious for her safety, I understood that for Gram to give them up would mean a concession to her increasing fragility, her mortality. For a woman who’d run away from home to become a showgirl more than seventy-five years earlier, relinquishing glamour would never come without a fight.

  I encouraged Gram to sit down while I finished preparing our meal. I took our pasta bowls into the dining gallery, then poured each of us a glass of chianti. Gram always said that a glass of wine with dinner helped the evening news go down more smoothly. She was addicted to it. The news program, not the wine. I turned on the broadcast, then went into the kitchen to fetch some cheese for Gram.

  “Isn’t that where you’re working now?” she asked me, motioning with her hand for me to join her so I could hear the anchorman’s report.

  I returned to the table to listen.

  “…the telecommunications and technology giant alleges that its legal counsel, the New York–based firm of Newter & Spade, along with AllGood Telecom’s certified public accountants at Morehouse and Essex, advised them to under-report their earnings in the face of numerous pending class-action lawsuits. The alleged under-reporting took place between the years of 1997 and 2002. A spokesman for AllGood would only communicate through his attorneys at Newter & Spade, who refused to comment at this time. The eighty-year-old law firm, as well as AllGood’s accountants, may be the next targets of government scrutiny in this case…” The program moved to the subsequent news segment, at which point Gram and I pulled our attention away from the TV screen and began eating our spaghetti in silence.

  “I wonder what that means for your pals,” Gram said thoughtfully.

  “They’re not my pals. In fact, they never stop reminding me that I’m ‘just a temp.’”

  “What about your man?” she asked.

  I studied the swirl of pasta wrapped around my fork. “I have no idea. I don’t know if he’s ever worked on any of the AllGood cases. You could always bring it up when he comes for dinner,” I smirked. “Or not.” I considered whether to share with her what was on my mind, then decided to go for it.

  “Do you have any idea how important your support is to me, in everything I do?” I asked Gram. “You’ve taught me that talent isn’t enough; that you have to partner it with tenacity to be a success in show business, and I extend that wisdom to the rest of my life. Okay, so not every guy I’ve given my heart to has turned out to be a prince.” I caught her raised eyebrow. It was better to own up to the truth myself. Hearing it from her lips made it more painful. “Fine. None of them have. Yet. Yet. Unlike you, Gram, I get back on the horse.”

  Her pale eyes immediately welled up with tears. I jumped up from the table and knelt by her chair. “I’m so sorry, Gram. I just…” I was at a loss for words.

  “Do you know why I never so much as went out for a cup of coffee after your grandfather went away?”

  I wanted to hear her answer, whether or not it was a confirmation of my assumptions, so I shook my head.

  “Because I always thought he was going to come back. Maybe later rather than sooner—but someday. When I was finally ready to admit I was living in a fantasy world where that was concerned, I was afraid that any other man I fell in love with would do the same thing. And I don’t want to see my history repeat itself with you, Alice. You deserve all the happiness you can manage.”

  I took Gram’s hands in mine. Hers were cold. I held them until the heat from my body warmed her. “Tell me honestly. Are you sure you’re not afraid I’ll abandon you, too, one day?”

  Gram’s eyes grew watery again. “Your spaghetti’s getting cold,” she said quietly. She deposited a gentle kiss on the top of my head.

  We ate the rest of our meal in silence.

  Gram was a good girl and didn’t broach the subject of Newter & Spade’s involvement in the AllGood Telecom investigations when Eric came over for dinner. We had a lovely meal, except that all conversation had halted during Gram’s news program when the anchor reported that Congress had convened a commission to study the AllGood situation, to determine what sort of malfeasance had been committed and who was responsible. There was a palpable and awkward silence at the table, then we dug back in to the chicken paprikash as though nothing had happened. Eric asked for a second slice of my homemade apple pie, then insisted on washing the dishes, which pleased Gram immensely. He’d also brought a lovely bottle of wine, which we devoured with our meal, and gave each of us a bouquet of flowers that he’d obviously taken some care to select, as opposed to grabbing something from the Korean deli on the next block.

  It seemed less awkward if Eric went back to Brooklyn alone after dinner. Besides, I could get Gram’s immediate and uncensored reaction to him. Whether Eric liked Gram was never an issue. Everyone loves my gra
ndmother.

  “Well, of course he was on his best behavior,” she said, after Eric had gone. “Do you love him?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I…think…so,” I said slowly. “There was never a single event where he did something so wonderful, for example, that all of a sudden it hit me like a ton of bricks and I realized, Wow, I love this guy! It’s more like something that’s been steadily building over time. We have a great time together, we talk a lot about anything and everything, we respect one another and one another’s feelings. We really get along in every way…”

  “Are you happy with him, Alice?”

  I nodded.

  “If you’re happy, then I’m happy,” Gram said slowly. “You deserve a man who knows your worth. And maybe this is the one.” I smiled. “But it’s not enough that he knows it. You have to know it, too. In fact, you have to know it first.” She gave my arm a firm but loving squeeze, the way she used to do when I was five or six years old.

  I came around behind her to give her a hug, and noticed, for the first time, how sparse her blond-tinted hair had become. Her hair had once been too thick to hold a curl. Back in the 1920s when marcel waving was all the vogue, Gram’s short wedge-shaped haircut needed an extra dose of chemicals to tame it. “How did you become so damn insightful, Gram?” I asked, still holding her, leaning over her shoulder, enjoying the familiar comfort of her favorite cologne.

  “So, you think I’m insightful, do you?”

  I rested my chin into her wisps of hair and nodded.

  “I can feel you laughing,” she remarked, when my chin bobbled a bit. Actually, I was trying very hard not to cry. She seemed so frail to me, so fragile. “Well, I no longer have good eyesight, so at least I should still have some insight. No one gets past ninety without learning a thing or two about life.”

  “I hope I get there, Gram.”

  “So do I. But I’ll let you in on a little secret, Alice. It’s no fun being old.”

  A tear traveled down my cheek, finding its way to her scalp, baptizing a strand or two of golden gray.

  “I can’t remember the last time Dominick and I went on a double date,” Izzy remarked, dabbing at a fresh brown gravy stain on her shirt. “Shit, I knew I should have stuck with just cheese fries.” I handed her another napkin. “In fact I can’t even remember the last time we went on a date at all.” Isabel turned to her husband, a good-looking, though slightly burly man with the blackest hair I’ve ever seen. “Dom, when was the last time we saw a movie?”

  Dominick instinctively inched away from his wife when she lifted a forkful of french fries smothered in cheese and gravy from the platter in the center of the table and brought it toward her own plate. Dominick used to be a fry cook in his dad’s diner. Now he does freelance computer repair. He’s a good person to know. Dom also knows his way around telephone and cable systems. For all I know, he and Izzy still get free HBO. “Why don’t you measure our dates by the quantity instead?” he asked Izzy. “Think about it. Count up the years we’ve been together. We were high school sweethearts,” he explained to Eric.

  “No, we weren’t,” Izzy corrected, “we hated each other back then.”

  “Yeah, but we still went out,” Dominick insisted.

  Isabel continued to push him. “You’re not answering my question, hon. When was the last time we saw a movie together?”

  “On DVD or video?” Dominick asked Izzy.

  “No, silly, in a movie theater. Movies at home don’t count.” She turned to Eric, said, “We saw Slap Shot last night for about the four hundredth time,” then looked back at Dominick. “Alice and I go to more movies than we’ve ever gone to. The last thing we probably saw was Terminator 2. That was the night you proposed to me.”

  “Well, that’s romantic,” Eric said, laughing. He was fitting in well with Izzy and Dominick, which was a relief. Dominick hates, I mean hates lawyers. They’re all evil scum-suckers, according to him. In fact, he did use that phrase in front of Eric, who didn’t take it to heart and deflected it nicely. Eric also avoided becoming defensive when Dominick launched into a diatribe against corporate greed that included some pointed questions about Newter & Spade’s representation of AllGood Telecom and the congressional hearings, which were now into their fifth week.

  Essentially, apart from those few uh-oh moments, the double date was a success. I was surprised that we’d been able to make it happen at all; it had taken the four of us several attempts. Izzy had to cancel once because she had a stomach virus, but the other seven times, Eric had to work late and begged off at the last minute. He offered to pick up the check, but Dominick insisted that they split it. Somehow, Eric’s accepting the offer made him a better man in Dominick’s eyes, even though it meant Dom’s springing for half the bill. Not that it would have broken anyone—we’d just gone to one of our favorite burger joints.

  Eric must have been enjoying my friends, because he seemed reluctant to end the evening so early.

  “Are you avoiding getting into bed with me tonight?” I teased.

  He gave me an affectionate kiss. “Quite the opposite, in fact, muppet. But I feel bad that it took us so long to finally all get together—which was mostly my fault—that I want to hang out a little more. I like Dominick, and your friend Izzy is a hoot.” He turned to the other couple. “Anyone here like old-fashioned folk music?”

  “You mean like Pete Seeger and Joni Mitchell?” Izzy asked.

  “I love Peter, Paul and Mary,” Dominick added. “I’m a sucker for ‘Puff, the Magic Dragon.’”

  Eric grinned. “I know a place in the Village. This tiny little club. It’s like stepping back into the sixties. A lot of folksingers got their start there, and the famous ones pop in from time to time, if they’re in town. Then they have these amateur nights…is tonight Saturday?”

  I nodded my head. “You must have had a hellish week,” I laughed, “since you can’t even remember what day it is.”

  “Either that or way too much beer at dinner,” Izzy rejoined.

  “Then we’re on!” Eric hailed a cab and the four of us piled in and headed down Ninth Avenue. We picked up Bleecker Street at Abingdon Square and continued east for a few blocks. “This is it, driver,” Eric said, tapping the Plexiglas shield that separated the front seat from the rear.

  “You know, you’d better be taking good care of my best friend,” Izzy said, conspiratorially pulling Eric toward her and steering him onto the sidewalk. “Because Dominick and I are Italian.” She was a bit looped after a few lite beers and her speech was a little slurry.

  I saw Eric give a perceptible little shudder. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I could just imagine the visions of Tony Soprano that danced across the forefront of his brain.

  “It means we have Italian tempers, that’s all,” Izzy sweetly replied. “Where the hell are we, anyway?”

  Eric proudly, and somewhat drunkenly, pointed to the unobtrusive storefront. “The Troubadour East,” he proclaimed as though he’d discovered the treasure of the Sierra Madre. “One of the best-kept secrets in New York.”

  “I’ll say. It doesn’t even have a sign out front,” observed Dominick.

  “I can’t believe you just said that to Eric,” I whispered to Izzy. Her expression made me laugh. Or maybe it was all the beer.

  “Just wanna keep him on his toes, that’s all.”

  “I think you may have scared the shit out of him.”

  “Alice, if there’s one thing you should have learned from your vast experience in temp hell…it’s you can’t scare the shit out of a lawyer!”

  Eric waited just outside the front door for the rest of us to join him. “So, what I was starting to say about Saturdays,” he began, “is that it’s open mike night. And I’ve seen some amazing amateurs up there. You wouldn’t heckle them with, ‘Keep your day job, bubba’!”

  “You sound funny saying ‘bubba.’” I giggled. I gestured dramatically to the club�
�s door. “Lead on, Macduff!”

  “It’s lay on, you nitwit!” Izzy corrected, playfully jabbing me in the arm.

  “I knew that,” I answered, trying to suppress an unladylike burp. “But why does everyone always say it wrong?”

  “Am I Shakespeare? Do I know?”

  We entered the club, a room not much bigger than Gram’s living room, just as dark, and not nearly as grand. The walls were exposed brick, hung with numerous posters from the great old days of folk music. Many of them were advertising placards, announcing appearances at the Troubadour East. In 1967, Dylan shared a bill there with Joan Baez and Buffy St. Marie.

  The venue wasn’t restricted to musicians, apparently. “Shit, Lenny Bruce played here,” Dominick said reverentially, reading one of the handbills. The late comic was a favorite of his. Dom shook his head. “What a fucking legend he was,” he murmured.

  On the tiny stage, a short-haired woman crooning ballads accompanied herself on a twelve-string guitar. She rested her short legs on a rung of the tall wooden stool, reminding me of a child in a high chair. A handful of people in the audience sat on mismatched chairs at funky tables, covered with a laminated decoupage of ancient Troubadour programs. There was scarcely room for the candle that provided the sole source of illumination and the tent card that listed the drinks menu. The Troubadour East didn’t serve any food, not even a pretzel.

  The singer finished her set, hopped off the stool, and stood her guitar against the back wall of the stage.

  “That was really nice, Laura,” Eric told the woman. “Are those your songs?” She nodded and he introduced us to her. “Laura’s the manager here. Her father founded and still owns the place, but he rarely comes in anymore.”

  “Well, it’s a rough commute,” Laura laughed. Her speaking voice was as husky and throaty as her singing voice. “He’s living on a sailboat in Sausalito.” She turned to Izzy, Dominick, and me. “Well, there’s no cover, no minimum here, so park yourselves and drink to your hearts’ content.” She gestured at the nearly empty room and stepped down from the tiny stage to take our orders.