Belong to Me: A Novel Read online

  “Well, anyway,” Piper said finally, “welcome to the neighborhood!”

  “It was nice to meet you,” I said, with all the sweetness I could muster, “Pepper.”

  “Likewise,” she said, flashing her teeth at me. Then she turned on her raffia-covered heel, her bob bobbing, and sang, “And it’s PI-per!” over her shoulder as she trotted across the street and into her house.

  That evening, over mediocre pizza, I described Piper to Teo, including the newscaster/ACC sorority-girl part, the head cocking, and blinding teeth.

  “I don’t think she liked me,” I said.

  “I like you,” said Teo, smiling, and putting down his pizza.

  I didn’t tell him what she’d actually said, the part about “real family,” the face she’d made when I’d told her we had no children. Teo and I had been in various stages of “trying” since we’d gotten married (full disclosure: since before we got married, but not much before). Why worry him? He had worried enough, we both had, and in the terrain of peaks and valleys Teo and I had been treading for the past three years, Piper’s face wasn’t even a pothole.

  That was Piper encounter number one.

  Encounter number two took place a few days later, when I opened my front door to find Piper and a plate of cookies. Piper was smiling. The round faces of the cookies, peeking up at me through the Saran wrap, seemed to be smiling, too. Despite my best efforts to hang on to my wariness, I found it slipping out of my head as the women of my childhood (Mrs. Sandoval, Mrs. Wang, Mrs. Jackson, Mrs. Egan, Mrs. Romanov, Mrs. McVey, Mrs. Brown) slipped in, with their firm voices and gentle hands.

  “How nice of you, Piper,” I said, taking the cookies. “Please come in.”

  Piper’s glance swiped the inside of my house, taking in the heaps of moving boxes, the discarded bubble wrap and newspapers.

  “No, thanks,” she said. “Actually, I was wondering if you might come out.”

  I set the cookies on the nearest box and walked outside.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Piper put her hands on her hips and said, “I was just noticing what the moving truck did to your lawn.”

  She walked over to the front corner of our yard and pointed, shaking her head. I followed her. A deep, tire-track-shaped muddy rut cut across one corner of the yard. It was only about three and a half feet long, but the expression on Piper’s face suggested that the rut was a horror, an abomination, that the rut cut across our yard and across the corner of Piper’s soul as well.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, vaguely. What else was there to say?

  She reached into her pocket, pulled out a business card, and handed it to me. “Our landscaper is excellent,” she said, “just top-notch. A little sod, maybe?”

  I took the card and stared at it.

  “And that bush.” Piper pointed to a bush, wrinkling her nose. “A hydrangea. It’s never done well.”

  “No?” God, who did this woman think she was?

  “No. My guy’ll yank that puppy right out of there before you can say boo.”

  Piper wasn’t talking about a real puppy, of course. She was talking about a bush, just a bush, and one even I had to admit looked half dead, but the bush was it, the final straw. Sparks began to fly behind my eyes, and a smothering cloud of outrage surrounded me.

  Before I’d regained my powers of speech, Piper said, brightly, “Anyway. Enjoy the cookies!” Then, smile, bobbing bob, and Piper was gone, crossing the street and slinking back into her lair.

  I threw the business card after her, an ineffectual missile, naturally. It fluttered into the center of the muddy rut.

  “Loathsome toad,” I growled aloud.

  “Loathsome toad,” I growled to Teo as soon as he’d returned home from his third trip to Home Depot in forty-eight hours. “Loathsome Jane Pauley Tarheel toad.”

  “You went to an ACC school,” Teo said. “You know that, right?” He grinned his curly-cornered grin at me.

  “Whose side are you on?” I demanded, although of course I knew the answer. Always, and in every way that mattered, mine. And, when I took the long view, I understood that Teo’s serene core, his failure to go ape-shit crazy over all that made me ape-shit crazy was a quality I treasured. But sometimes I take the short view. Right then, I wanted Teo to cut the “core of serenity” crap and call Piper some names.

  He leaned in to kiss me, but I turned away. “Traitor.”

  “How can I prove my loyalty?” Teo asked, leaning in again. “Buy you a garden troll?”

  “Gnome.” I gave him a push. “And I am not overreacting.”

  “A set of plastic flamingos?”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  By way of accounting for the depth of my indignation, I considered telling Teo about my first conversation with Piper, but decided not to. It was easier if he thought I was only furious about insolence and insulted shrubbery.

  “Plastic flamingos would give old Pepper a seizure disorder, don’t you think?” said Teo.

  “Teo, it’s our lawn!” In all my life, it had never occurred to me to want a lawn. In fact, it had occurred to me to not, under any circumstances, want a lawn. But now that I had one, I’d defend every last blade of grass in it. “It’s our grass,” I told Teo.

  I had a thought. “Listen, Teo. Walt Whitman said, ‘I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars.’” Although the line’s relevance to the situation at hand was elusive, even to me, I felt a surge of triumph.

  “Oh.” Teo nodded contemplatively. “Wow. So we’ll make it two garden trolls.”

  I held Teo at arm’s length and eyed him, his flushed face and clear green eyes, his mouth. One of the many salient facts about my husband is that he has the most perfect upper lip ever invented. I felt myself giving way.

  “Gnomes,” I said, faintly.

  “Hell,” he said, “let’s go all the way. Three. Three trolls.” I could feel the shape of his shoulder through his shirt. “Would that show you whose side I’m on?”

  I sighed. I shrugged.

  “Forty-five minutes of sex among the boxes ought to do it,” I said.

  And it did, but the fact that I was thus diverted from my self-righteous indignation didn’t mean I wasn’t still indignant. And the fact that my indignation was self-righteous didn’t mean it wasn’t also righteous. Right?

  Thus, you can imagine my chagrin when, just as a bowl of cool gazpacho was being placed before me, Piper herself came scuttling into the dining room with a man I presumed to be the unlucky Mr. Truitt in tow.

  “Hello, all! Here at last!” cried Piper. “Megan, we let ourselves in. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Get me out of here,” I whispered into the shining red depths of my soup.

  Apparently, Megan didn’t mind that they’d let themselves in. In fact, the expression on Megan’s face bespoke pure, near-frantic delight as she flew out of her chair and across the room to embrace Piper.

  “I’m so sorry to be late,” said Piper, settling herself down in the chair Megan’s husband pulled out for her. “We dragged ourselves away from the Lowerys’ cocktail hour just as quickly as we could.”

  The woman seated next to me, whose name was Kate, tilted her head toward mine and said, “The Lowery, Lowery, and Lerner Lowerys,” to which there was no possible reply.

  “I’d love to see the inside of that house,” exclaimed Kate. “Was it fabulous?”

  “I guess it was,” said Piper, shrugging. “The party was so boring, I barely noticed.”

  “Now, Piper,” said Piper’s husband. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “It was dreadful,” asserted Piper, shooting her husband a disparaging glare.

  “Only you would call the Lowerys boring, Piper,” remarked Megan affectionately, looking a bit surprised afterward, sheepish, as though she hadn’t known she’d had it in her to say such a thing.

  I glanced at Megan’s face as she gazed at Piper and then I glanced at the faces of the other women a
t the table. Ah, I thought, Queen Bee. Figures.

  “Piper, Kyle,” said Megan’s husband, Glen, “this is Mateo Sandoval, a new colleague of mine, and his wife, Cornelia.”

  Piper turned to Teo, and I set down my soupspoon and leaned in to watch for the inevitable shift, the unconscious softening of expression that happens to women’s faces when they meet my husband. Teo’s mother is Swedish and his father’s Filipino, which is apparently some recipe for genetic alchemy because Teo is this combination of about ten different shades of golden brown that almost no one can help but notice.

  And there it was. The slight parting of the lips. The hand reaching up to touch the pendant on her necklace. The almost-purr in Piper’s voice as she said, “Hello, Mateo.”

  Since I might sound like a jealous wife and since there are few roles more humiliating, I should tell you right now that I’m not. I’m used to seeing people see Teo. The first time I noticed it, at one of those Memorial Day picnics I mentioned earlier, I was all of five years old.

  All the neighborhood kids were playing what I still avow was the longest and best game of freeze tag ever played anywhere, and Teo was it. As he was running, one of the mothers caught him by the shoulder, stopping him cold, stared at his face, and said, “Mateo Sandoval, you are the handsomest child I have ever seen.” And while we all stood around panting, slumped with waiting, Teo blushed, ducked his head, gave the mother a polite, upward smile, then took off running as though he’d never stopped. It was a scenario that would repeat itself pretty regularly over the nearly three decades since. Teo looking like Teo; people noticing; then, if Teo even notices their noticing: blush-duck-smile-move along like it never happened.

  Really, it hardly registered with me anymore except as a source of amusement at Teo’s discomfort. And forget jealous. When I saw Piper’s face change, I wanted to hoot “Hallelujah!” and enwrap Kate in a celebratory hug, but I settled for high-fiving myself under the table. If Piper had to be my neighbor, it was good to know she might be human after all.

  “I saw Armand Assante in a Starbucks,” I said.

  We were talking about New York City.

  Megan had seen Richard Gere. Glen had seen the guy in An Officer and a Gentleman who wasn’t Richard Gere, a coincidence that, for about two seconds, sent everyone into a breathless state of cosmic awe. Piper had seen Uma Thurman (“huge feet, no makeup, and dark roots, and I do mean dark”). Kate’s husband, Jeffrey, had seen Jill Hennessy from Law & Order, but then had, as he was falling asleep that night, suddenly remembered that Jill Hennessy had an unfamous identical twin, and was kept awake by the possibility that the woman he’d seen in a leather jacket walking her dog might not have been Jill Hennessy at all, a story that somehow made me like the guy. Kate had seen “that gymnast, oh, what’s her name, the really short one.” I had seen Armand Assante in a Starbucks.

  “I saw Armand Assante in a Starbucks,” I said.

  Silence. The kind of silence that thickens the air in the room to the consistency of gravy. For a mad couple of seconds, I wondered if I only thought I’d said, “I saw Armand Assante in a Starbucks,” and instead had barked like a seal.

  Then, finally, Kate: “The tennis player who used to be married to Brooke Shields?”

  Everyone ignored this, although I saw Teo’s lips twitch.

  Then Piper said, coolly, “I don’t think I’d know Armand Assante if I saw him.”

  “Oh, but you would!” I began.

  “I don’t think so,” interrupted Piper, firmly. “I don’t think I’d know him if I saw him. I don’t think I know who Armand Assante is.”

  “But that’s the beauty of Armand Assante,” I said. “Even if you’d never seen any of his movies, even if you’d never heard the name before, you would look at him and instantly say, ‘That’s Armand Assante.’ He just is Armand Assante.”

  Everyone looked at me. Everyone except my husband, who grinned into his glass of wine.

  “What does that mean?” asked Piper, masking, or pretending to mask, her derision with a tight little smile.

  “Oh, you know what I mean,” I said, laughingly.

  “No,” said Piper, unlaughingly, “I don’t.” The corners of Piper’s modestly lipsticked, petal pink smile were actually turning white. She’s furious, I thought. Holy hell.

  “I just mean…” I groaned. Not aloud, but inside, every cell of my body was groaning at the top of its lungs. “Well, he had this slicked-back hair, and gold rings, and this suit, and those very European shoes, pointy…”

  Henry David Thoreau said, “City life is millions of people being lonesome together,” and, yes, there came a time when I agreed. But I was beginning to wonder if, when it came to isolation, the city had nothing on this new place, this would-be haven. I wondered if I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire because, for my money, there are few experiences more isolating in the world than picking up a joke that’s fallen flat, brushing it off, and then choking the life out of it by explaining it to a roomful of strangers who will never, not in a million years, get it.

  “I’m good at dinner parties!” I wanted to shout. “Dinner parties are my natural habitat! I am appropriately dressed and good at dinner parties!”

  As far as soul-bruising events go, this one, when taken alone, was relatively minor. Not even in the same soul-bruising-event universe as the time I’d stood on the top riser at the school Christmas concert and thrown up on half of the third grade, midway through “White Christmas.” Maybe just a little worse than the time I’d walked into a salon and day spa and said, in a moment of distraction, “I’d like to make an appointment for a pedophile.” And compared to my deeper, more recent contusions, it was almost nothing: thumbprint-sized and pale, barely there.

  Except. Except I had the sneaking feeling that this wouldn’t be an isolated event. That this lonely moment was the first of many lonely moments, so many that if you were to string them all together and look at them from a certain angle, they’d make up not a lonely life, I wasn’t feeling that gloomy, but at least a lonely epoch in an otherwise unlonely life. The person I’d been for most of that life wouldn’t have minded a stint of loneliness, at least not minded much, but I hadn’t been that person for a while.

  I sat there, with the dinner party droning and burgeoning around me. You chose this, I reminded myself. This is where you live now. These people are your people.

  I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was still there.

  TWO

  As Piper sat on a hard, wooden, undersized chair in a brightly lit school library, without warning, from out of nowhere or from out of a past so distant that it felt like nowhere, the memory of the man’s back came to her.

  There was no way in the world she could remember the man’s name (because he had not been particularly important to her, had not even so much been “the man” as “a man,” one of many), but there it was, a back Piper hadn’t seen in, God, it must be fifteen years. And it was as if she were seeing it at that moment, as though she were not sitting in the crowded library but were instead naked, tangled in sheets on the bed in the man’s apartment with the man’s back before her, within touching distance of her hands and mouth.

  The man’s back was tanned and V shaped. Water trickled down the cleft of spine toward the white towel wrapped around his narrow hips. How she had loved damp men, men just out of the shower, gleaming and supple, but also somehow softer than usual. Newly born and fragile.

  Piper sat in the library of what would be, in a few days, her son’s school, what technically already was his school, she reminded herself with satisfaction, since she’d talked Kyle into bypassing the quarterly payment-plan option—might as well wear a sign saying “We don’t know if we can really afford this”—and putting up a full year’s tuition two months ago. Technically, Tallyrand Academy had been Carter’s school for two months. More technically, for two months, the Truitts had been a Tallyrand family. She and Kyle had been Tallyrand parents. She and Kyle were Tallyrand pare
nts. WELCOME, TALLYRAND PARENTS! proclaimed the easel-propped dry-erase board by the library door.

  Piper looked around at the other parents, many of them people she knew, noting what an attractive group they comprised, how tidily turned out and uniformly tan. The men had expensive but unflashy watches; the women had expertly summer-streaked hair and manicured toes peeping out of sandals. It was true that three of the women were less than slender. A ten, a ten, and a twelve, Piper estimated. But three out of roughly fifty was certainly not bad, especially when you considered—and Piper never considered this without a shudder—that the average American woman was a fourteen.

  Just as she glimpsed her husband entering the library, Piper had a sudden memory of herself playfully slipping on the man’s—the other man’s, the fifteen-years-ago, nameless man’s—white coat, like a robe, going into his bathroom to brush her teeth. She could see the edge of the white coat against her tan, nineteen-year-old thigh. A medical resident. Or perhaps a fellow. Probably a fellow, since Piper had generally chosen men who were considerably older than she and as many removes from her world as possible. An ophthalmologist, she remembered now. He’d made flirtatious jokes—weak but sweet jokes—about looking into her eyes.

  Kyle stopped to talk to the headmaster, but met Piper’s gaze across the room. He gave her a look that said “Made it!” She gave him a look that said “Just under the wire.”

  Kyle’s job moved in cycles of frantic activity and relative quiet, the vicissitudes of which still eluded Piper, although, a few years ago, she had made one long conversation’s worth of good-faith effort to understand them. She remembered with fondness Kyle’s almost childlike enthusiasm at answering her questions about this mysterious, intricate ebb and flow, but when he’d gotten out a notebook and begun to supplement his information with chartlike hieroglyphs, she’d tuned out. Consequently, Piper was not entirely clear on the reasons for Kyle’s current, prolonged period of busyness, but she found that she didn’t need to understand it in order to find it inconvenient and irritating.