All My Mother's Lovers Read online

  Maggie’s left hand reflexively tightens on her jeans. The denim is coarse or soft, depending which direction her fingers move along the lines of its weave. It feels nothing like a human hand. Self-consciously, she holds her own hands together and closes her eyes, tries to imagine that her right hand isn’t hers but her mother’s. Just for a moment, she manages to divorce herself from the touch of one hand, focusing so completely on the other that it’s as if Iris really is there, really is holding her hand again on that onetime bonding experience.

  But then the illusion disappears and a heavy warmth settles on Maggie’s chest, the kind that comes before crying. Her mother is dead. She will never again comfort Maggie on a flight, or any other time. She’ll never again tell her that she’s doing great. Not that Iris was quick to express love, or that Maggie has needed her all that much in recent years; it’s that the option was there. The nest existed. Her parents, cocooned in their separate and busy lives but coming together for their children, at least most of the time.

  No more.

  She shuts her eyes and breathes deeply, swallowing past the lump in her throat as best she can. She decides to deploy the relaxation method she uses when she’s smoked something unfamiliar that makes her paranoid or when she has a bad hangover that makes her feel half dead: recalling her work scripts, the things she tells people when she’s trying to sell them more insurance or when they have questions about the things they want to purchase. The scripts are relatively new, because the agency she works for changed a bunch of their product titles a couple of years ago, and everyone had to practice replacing the earlier language. Auto-Death Indemnity, for instance, became Medical Payments Coverage.

  “No one,” the company rep in charge of retraining explained, “wants to hear the word ‘death’ when buying insurance.” Insurance is a tricky business that way; it prepares people for the worst, which they hope won’t happen, but it also makes them aware that it could. “Don’t remind people of their mortality,” the rep said. “Or remind them how vulnerable they are. Explain how vulnerable they could be if they don’t purchase our product. Ultimately, you’re selling them a promise that nothing bad will happen to them. That’s really what we’re about.”

  It’s a soothing lie, Maggie knows, but it was a novel one when she started working there—her parents rarely made promises, even down to little things like reasonable birthday gift requests, so she never learned how empty so many of them could be.

  Medical Payments Coverage, she explains to an imaginary faceless customer while trying to maintain her steady breathing, is a no-fault auto-insurance coverage for the worst-case scenario. She hopes Iris had the right kind of insurance. What if you and your loved ones are driving down I-55 . . . They have some savings, but a lot was lost in 2008, and they had to take out a second mortgage on the house at one point . . . and some asshole—excuse my French, ma’am—is texting behind the big wheel of his truck and he plows right into you? That’s not what happened, though, was it? It was a tree, Ariel said, not anyone’s fault. Well, if you choose this coverage . . . What a strange word: “coverage.” Like a blanket . . . we’d be able to help pay medical and funeral expenses for you or your passengers . . .

  Maggie feels the plane lurch and sits up straight, yanking her earbuds out, heart pounding. She must have fallen asleep.

  “We’re descending now to LAX, folks,” the captain’s voice comes on the overhead speakers, crackly and soft. “The weather is sunny and mild, with southwesterly breezes and a lovely seventy-eight degrees.”

  IRIS

  AUGUST 20, 2017

  Stillness. Darkness. Waves of passing sound. Death, she discovers, is like being taken out to sea by the tide. Peaceful once she stops fighting the pain of it. Or is this just the story she tells herself in order to handle the sharpness running through her?

  But no, before that. Before the end.

  It was Iris’s day off. A Sunday. She’d just returned from the first half of a corporate weekend in Las Vegas, leaving the last couple of days in the hands of her capable assistant, Anya. She disliked Vegas, but more and more companies seemed to be making semipermanent homes there, for tax reasons she assumed, and still others just liked flying their people out for lavish yet well-contained vacations. The thing about Vegas, Iris felt, was that it was predictably glitzy, which made it lose its teeth. No, that wasn’t quite right—after all, the Strip was just one part of the city. It was the tourists who were predictable in Vegas. You could often tell, she thought, what people would want to do there, and what services bosses would want to provide. Her clients tended to underestimate the prices, though, as if Vegas being a place of clichés built upon other clichés made it cheap. There was the toilet-paper manufacturer who brought his corporate office to a retreat and wanted everyone to get free massages, then balked at the price and complained to Iris about his budget. There was the head of a bridesmaid-model company who insisted on finding not just one but three separate male revues for her girls to go wild at and then got peeved at how much she was billed for lap dances. Iris always tried to warn them, but it seemed people forgot money’s worth in Vegas. Part of Iris’s job as a corporate events planner, of course, was to keep things inside the client’s budget and she almost never strayed out of it, keeping a section cordoned off for extra expenses that her clients never thought to consider.

  This latest excursion—a boutique-winemaker conference—had been relatively simple, but she was relieved to be home. She had a whole week ahead of her without traveling, a rare treat, and she meant to take advantage of it. Peter was already up and at it when she got out of bed—she could tell because the house smelled deliciously of coffee, the hazelnut kind he indulged in on weekends. Ariel was still asleep, she was pretty certain. She hoped so—she didn’t feel like getting fully dressed yet, and she knew that her bralessness inside one of the many ratty T-shirts she slept in made him uncomfortable. She’d noticed him averting his gaze before. It was heartbreaking, how she’d become old and repulsive to him at some point, her body’s existence embarrassing him. She wasn’t sure when it had happened, and she knew it was normal, but she still felt a twinge of pain when he looked away from her like that. A reminder that the last link of intimacy between their bodies, once babushka-dolled one inside the other, was severed for good. She put her hand on Ariel’s shut and locked door and silently bid him to sleep a little longer, just until she had the energy to get dressed.

  “Hello, sleepyhead,” Peter said when she passed his office. Iris waved but kept going to the kitchen and coffee. He followed her there and hugged her from behind as she poured herself a mug.

  “Mmph,” she said, elbowing him to let her go, and got the milk from the fridge. He put his hands up, surrendering with a grin. “It’s Sunday, and it’s morning, stop being so perky,” she groaned at him. But she didn’t mean it. This was Peter, and she loved how unfairly upbeat he was.

  “What are you up to today?” he asked, leaning against the kitchen island. Without waiting, he went on. “I have some errands to do, and I’m catching up on that project for the museum, they’ve asked for some more adjustments, but—”

  “Honey, why oh why don’t you put it in your contract that you’ll only do two or three rounds of changes before adding an additional fee?” Iris shook her head. Peter was a good artist, a good graphic designer, but not the best businessman. She should know; she was the one who did their taxes and dealt with their finances. Some years he barely made a profit, what with the subscriptions to various software and the way he took his time with projects. She was the one who’d really kept them afloat. Peter’s income was chump change in comparison to the fees she charged her clients.

  He shrugged. “They’re a nonprofit. I’m okay with doing a bit more work.”

  Iris didn’t understand him in this way, how much he seemed to enjoy the work in itself and how little monetary value he placed on his time. She took a sip of coffee and decided she d
idn’t care. This was an old argument, a boring one, and they were doing all right right now, still paying the mortgage, alas, but also building their savings back up, preparing a small nest egg they could hopefully leave their children. Which reminded her. “You know, Anya asked me yesterday when I’m planning to retire.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, she really did. I don’t think she meant it to sound so rude. But she’s more ambitious and grasping than she realizes.”

  “Are you dangling that in front of her now?” Peter asked. Iris raised her eyebrows. He knew her well. It was a good way to keep the excellent assistant around, hinting at a possible promotion, a passing of the baton she wasn’t planning on anytime soon. “Anyway, sorry, what did you say you were doing today?” he asked.

  “I didn’t yet, but yeah, I have to take my stuff to that dry cleaner that’s open on Sundays, you know the one, the Ocean Breeze place or whatever it’s called. Other than that, I’m going to relax a bit. Oh, and volunteering tonight,” she added, offhand, though of course she hadn’t for a moment forgotten about it.

  “Ah, yes, my wife the do-gooder,” Peter said. “Well, I hope you relax in my office at some point. I’d love a nap on the chaise with you.”

  Iris palmed his cheek before hugging him. She reveled in the way his arms squeezed her torso just a little too hard, anchoring her. She’d been gone only three days, but still, it was always so good to be home.

  * * *

  • • •

  BY THE TIME Ariel emerged from his bedroom, Iris was dressed in her weekend clothes—a pair of loose-fitting slacks and a light cotton long-sleeved shirt—and was lounging on the living room couch with the latest Faye Kellerman novel. He traipsed in with both his hands scratching around inside his gray sweatpants and yanked them out when he saw her, like a child caught with his fingers in the cookie jar.

  “Hi,” he said. “I thought you were coming back tomorrow?”

  “Nope. How’re you doing, kiddo?”

  “Ugh.”

  “Still no word from . . .” She struggled to recall the name. Lena? Leonora? Leanna? “. . . that girl you like?” she ended up saying.

  “I don’t like her, Mom. It’s not like that. We’re friends.” Ariel stomped to the kitchen and put his head in the fridge.

  “Right,” Iris murmured, only half to him. The girl in question had been friends with Ariel all through college so far, and had visited with him for Thanksgiving once and for spring break another time, and Iris was fairly certain Ariel was in love with her. She could picture the girl’s sweet face, her clean-cut girl-next-door looks, the drab brown hair that always looked like it just needed a good shampoo-commercial makeover to make it shine. But her name—Iris was bad with names, some days. She always had been, especially outside of work, but she wondered idly if it was getting worse. Or if she was being paranoid because she was in her sixties and was expected to be decrepit. Her own mother at this age had looked and acted so much older than Iris looked or felt, which made sense, of course. After all, being humiliated and marked and moved around, suffering a terrible loss, living through a war, and then immigrating to the United States ages a person. “Hey, Ariel, want to come with me to the dry cleaner’s?”

  He lowered a bottle of orange juice from his mouth, where he’d been sucking on it ravenously. “Um. Not really?”

  Iris laughed, loving him for his honesty. “Fair enough.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE EVENING, Iris gathered her purse and keys and set out for the second time that day. Peter didn’t know what she was really doing at the Caring Place, the assisted-living facility she’d been visiting almost weekly for the past couple of months. There were plenty of things that Peter didn’t know about the way she spent her time, and she was sure there were just as many things she didn’t know about how he spent his. Still, she felt uncomfortable—she wouldn’t say guilty, but only because she’d tried to scrub that useless emotion away a long time ago—having a secret so close to home, to Peter. She wasn’t worried about Ariel, since he’d never expressed much interest in her life outside of her involvement in his, though as he got older, she supposed that would change. It had for her. But home was hers and Peter’s sacred space, and though he was the true homebody of the two of them, Iris had enough respect for him and for what they’d built together to have a modicum of unease.

  Not that it stopped her from going.

  On the drive there, she caught herself touching the sides of her lips over and over again, making sure her lipstick hadn’t strayed or smeared. It was ridiculous, she thought, being nervous now, at this point, with all that history behind them, with him in the state he was in now. But it didn’t make any difference; rediscovering him, and them, had kept her giddy for weeks, aching to get home for more than the usual reasons.

  She parked in the visitors’ section and pulled down the mirror to check her lips one last time. She noticed a bit of sleep in her right eye from the nap she’d had earlier with Peter on his favorite piece of furniture in the house, the jade-green chaise longue, its velvet long since hardened and scratchy. Still, he loved the angle, the way he could hold her on his side just right without his shoulder pain getting in the way, the way he could scoop her close to him and wrap one leg over hers. She was truly one of the luckiest women alive, she thought, though she knew only a fraction of it was luck, really—she’d created circumstances for herself over and over again. Like this, here, now.

  Her low heels clicked across the smooth parking lot, the lines of the spaces recently repainted and sharply white, almost gleaming in the twilight. Inside, Darlene, the Sunday evening nurse, greeted her with a smile. “Harold is having a good day,” she said. “He’s in the rec room.”

  “Oh good, thank you,” Iris said. At the doorway to the rec room, she saw Harold sitting, a bit slumped, watching a rowdy card game that several gentlemen were engaged in, along with a lady Iris hadn’t seen there before. She smiled at the curses the players were hurling at one another as they demanded the woman make her move to call or fold, but she was holding her cards in her lap and waving a disapproving finger at them, insisting they give her the proper time to consider her odds.

  “She’s counting cards, you idiots,” Harold boomed suddenly, and Iris laughed. He heard her—he was blessed with better hearing than Iris’s own, which was beginning to fail, a fact he relentlessly teased her about, since he was two decades her senior. When he turned to look at her, his face, normally a distinguished craggy mask, spread wide with his smile, causing his cheeks to further wrinkle up toward his eyes even while his jaw seemed to smooth out. Iris was herself fairly lined, but she’d been watching the people here since she began visiting, fascinated by the many ways skin could weather the years. “Well, look who it is!” Harold called out.

  Deliberately, slowly, Iris walked forward, her thick hips swaying, and released her hair, which had been up in a high bun, from its clip. Her wavy almost-black hair with its unevenly dispersed streaks of gray tumbled down to her shoulders, and Harold wolf-whistled as she shook it out behind her. She knew other women her age who felt at peace with their looks, but she could never quite tell if that meant they also still felt sexy at times. She did, at least in moments like these. The cardplayers clapped and whooped for her, the lady winking and grinning widely, showing off a single missing tooth.

  “Hello, Iris,” Harold said as she pulled up a chair and sat down. The cardplayers included a couple of Harold’s new friends, though she couldn’t recall their names. The woman just waved and then asked the others if they were ready to play or if they wanted to keep gawping at young women. Iris laughed at this. She was certainly not young, and her skin showed far more wear than some other women her age. Still, the lady had a point—every time Iris came here, she registered a shock at seeing so many old people in one place, before reminding herself she too could be considered old, that people on th
e street probably thought of her as such.

  “It’s busy here tonight,” Iris said. The room was relatively full, visitors sitting with residents, children running around with the kind of pack mentality that kids thrust together seem to acquire quickly.

  “No busier than usual,” Harold said. “But let’s go to my room and open a bottle of wine, shall we?”

  “Hubba-hubba!” one of the men sing-songed, raising extremely bushy gray eyebrows.

  “Now, now, be nice,” Iris said as she helped Harold up. He leaned on her, the exertion of rising showing in his pained face. “Where’s your walker?”

  “I got here without it today,” he told her proudly, but she could tell that he was tired, his knees wobbling a bit. Darlene had said he was having a good day, but Iris wondered how much of that was Harold feeling well and how much of it was shame over his need for assistance. His face began to redden as they walked slowly toward the elevator in the hallway by the rec room, and Iris wanted to suggest a rest, or that she borrow a walker from the room they’d just left, but he looked determined, mouth set in a hard line. She didn’t want to ruin his good mood.

  The elevator was equipped with a small bench, and Iris maneuvered Harold to it and sat with him for the short ride up to the third story, where his room was. He wasn’t panting, but he wasn’t comfortable, and even as he gripped her hand, he looked away.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” she said.