Hotel No Tell Read online

  Even the guests were an homage to the city, including as they did people like Roxana (“Not a single one of my neighbors in Hillsville was a prostitute,” Lucy said disdainfully), her favorite barista from Grounded, and one of the trainers from the local trapeze school. The menu was a mash of all her favorite comfort food from neighborhood joints and made no sense for a hot day: bacon burgers from BLT Burger, braised tofu from Gobo, lamb ouzi from Salam, mac and cheese from Chat ’N’ Chew, and mint chicken noodles and fresh-squeezed watermelon juice from Republic. The aromas clashed horribly, but Lucy was unfazed.

  I finally spotted Macy, who had kicked off her shoes and was curled up on the sage-green sofa, her fiery hair fanned out over the back cushions. At her feet was her new boyfriend, a pigeon-toed auctioneer named Kirk who had suffered nothing worse than a head cold after six dates with Macy (though, to be sure, a head cold was a serious professional hazard for him). At her side was Asa, Macy’s anointed savior, the man who had led her to Wendy the Wonder Wiccan of Fort Greene. Wendy, presiding over a ceremony that had included earthworms, down pillows, and sundry incantations, had, by all accounts (Macy’s and Asa’s), broken the curse. Indeed, as far as we knew, there had been no dead brides or suitors in Macy’s wake for at least five months now.

  Asa jumped up to give me his seat; he still regarded me with a strange kind of awe even though I had gone out of my way to show him my real life, to persuade him that I wasn’t some Mata Hari with mystery spicing every gesture (much as I longed for that to be true). He was now fully insinuated into my friendships, sometimes a little too much so. I tried to hide my surprise that he’d been invited.

  “C’mon, the suburbs aren’t that bad,” Kirk was saying. He adjusted the foam spikes atop his head.

  “Oh, you just don’t know what it was like for her,” Macy said darkly, as if she had been sequestered upstate with Lucy.

  “Of course I know. I grew up in the burbs,” Kirk reminded Macy.

  Lucy appeared out of nowhere and bounced onto the sofa. “Don’t say that word at this party,” she said lightly. “Are you guys having fun? Isn’t this amazing? You can just walk over, Zephyr! No more Metro-North. Do you know, last night we were watching TV and we wanted ice cream, and I went out and got it before the commercials were over!”

  “Don’t you have TiVo?” Macy asked suspiciously.

  “Seriously,” Kirk persisted. “Lucy, there wasn’t anything you liked? Big supermarkets? The sounds of silence? Turning right on red?”

  “I liked turning right on red,” she conceded. “But the sounds of silence? More like tinnitus.”

  At that moment, matching shrieks pierced the air. Lucy shot off the sofa and in one deft move confiscated a salad spinner to which Amanda and Alan were each claiming sole ownership. In an act of astounding maternal mathematics, she grabbed two spatulas off the kitchen island—two spatulas apparently being equal to one Oxo salad spinner—and the battle ceased. She returned to us, beaming.

  “I like them again, all of them,” she confided. “Especially Leonard. I actually really think they’re pretty terrific.” Kirk and Asa looked startled, but Lucy didn’t notice.

  “Nothing to do with the fact that Lenore is out of your hair and you’re going back to work?” Macy said this to Lucy but was looking at me. I avoided meeting her eyes, so I wouldn’t begin to laugh. Lucy was at her most blissfully earnest and oblivious today.

  “Oh, of course those help. Tremendously. But it’s more that I don’t feel so isolated. Neither does Leonard. He’s a whole new person since we moved back.”

  We looked doubtfully at Leonard, who was hovering awkwardly over his offspring. He twitched a step backward as Roxana approached and asked him a question. He pointed to me.

  “Ah, Zepheer!” she called as she strode over in a clingy wraparound dress, her blond knot of hair waggling at the back of her head. She kissed me on both cheeks and then greeted everyone else with equal enthusiasm. “Lucy, you are so luffly to invite me. I luuuf to see the beautiful real estate!”

  I’m sure half the people there had come to see the inside of a Richard Meier apartment, but leave it to Roxana to admit outright that it was her primary incentive. I appreciated the honesty, and since Lucy had invited Roxana for her thrill value, I suspected she wasn’t offended in the least.

  “I’m so glad you came,” Lucy told her, then lowered her voice. “I hope it won’t be awkward if Gideon shows up.”

  Roxana looked genuinely perplexed. My brother’s proposed documentary about her had died in its infancy, right about the time he made a pass at her and she gently laughed him off as “a leetle baby boy I could nut pussibly make luf to.” It was the sort of rebuff she was no doubt obliged to make on a weekly basis to any number of men, but it had sent Gideon into paroxysms of indignation, humiliation, and scriptwriting. My parents, needless to say, had breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  “Now, Lucy,” Roxana said dramatically, waving away thoughts of my brother. “I hear your mother wus on layaway! Zees is so eggzyting, no?”

  Everyone looked at me.

  “She means Lenore,” I interpreted. “It was Lucy’s mother-in-law,” I corrected Roxana, “and you mean stowaway, not layaway, but that’s not really what you mean, either.”

  Luckily, I spotted my father striding in from the elevator and was able to excuse myself before I had to listen to the retelling of Lenore’s maritime adventures as explained to Roxana.

  “Darling daught!” my dad bellowed, unconcerned with the momentary halt in all conversation. I hugged him tightly, pressing my cheek to his necktie, extracting every last bit of parental approval.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “On her way,” he said, and I couldn’t help feeling a faint flash of relief that I would have a few moments alone with the parent who was not openly disappointed in me. “Wow! Look at this place!” He made a sweeping gesture that included the river, New Jersey, and beyond.

  “Dad, you’ve seen this view a dozen times.”

  “Yes, but this is New Lucy’s view. It’s Happy Lucy’s apartment! It looks vastly different,” he gushed. Then he switched to a stage whisper, the lowest his voice was capable of dropping. “How is she, you know, doing?”

  “Dad, don’t,” I murmured.

  Under the assumption that it didn’t count if I told my parents, I’d revealed Lucy’s entanglement in the Summa–Recherché case and in doing so had exposed so much more than I ought to have. In part, I knew, I had told the secrets to my mother as a proxy for everything I couldn’t confide to her about myself these days. Still, that one of my best friends had been directly and deeply affected by the crime, that I had helped her get hired by the city to offer counseling to the families involved, and that I had actually met the genetic mother of her children—it was all too much to keep to myself.

  Zelda Herman’s high forehead, square chin, and almond eyes worked beautifully on Alan and Amanda, but she had zero interest in viewing the results for herself, and so Lucy and Leonard considered themselves among the fortunate victims. None of the families whose children had been created out of what were supposed to be anonymous eggs had any desire for contact with the biological mothers. But many of the young donors—or, more often, their parents—had been shattered by the news that their eggs had been given life, and what followed had been a three-ring circus involving the courts, the professional counseling community, and, of course, the media. The only good that had come of it had been an extraordinary opportunity for Lucy to reenter the workforce.

  My dad pointed out the window and across Perry Street to where Mercedes stood in her living room holding up a whiteboard. “What on earth is she doing?”

  I grabbed the binoculars from the table behind us, kept there for just this purpose.

  D just got home. Be over in a minute.

  “Fantastic!” my dad said, watching as I scrawled a response on Lucy’s whiteboard. “In an age of texting, this is pure poetry.”

  “I don’t know if
I’d call it poetry,” I said, as I flashed the answer: Hurry. I can’t stay long. “But it’s fun. Like talking through tin cans.”

  We watched as Mercedes tried to bend over to retrieve her binoculars, then resorted to squatting. “Good thing she’s not a cellist,” my dad mused. “What do cellists do when they’re pregnant?”

  Mercedes and Dover had gone over to the drooly side. Mercedes was three months away from, as she put it, forever being mistaken for the nanny. But leave it to her, of course, to make pregnancy look downright sexy; no doubt she’d make parenthood look glamorous and romantic.

  “Look at that beautiful silhouette,” my dad said reverently, as Mercedes turned sideways to tuck the whiteboard away. I shifted uncomfortably. That was the kind of unsubtle nuance best left to my mother. He put his hands heavily on my shoulders.

  “Oh, Zephy.”

  “What?” I asked, bracing myself.

  He hesitated, which was so uncharacteristic that I looked up at him.

  “When you’re losing your friends, when your body is letting you down in new ways every day, when your memory is capricious at best, at least … at least you have your kids.”

  I nodded and put my hands over his, wishing I could vanquish the melancholy that he and my mom would always feel and that I was slowly—very slowly—learning to deflect.

  “Well, but on the other hand,” I said, as lightly as I could without sounding flip, “that means I have until I’m about seventy to enjoy having no dependents.”

  He squeezed my shoulders. “All you girls pride yourself on being so responsible, so on top of things, so dependable. What’s the point of being dependable if you won’t let anybody depend on you?”

  I considered this. “I let lots of people depend on me,” I reminded him. “You and mom. My friends. Gid, sometimes. My colleagues, my boss—”

  “Me.”

  We turned to find Gregory standing behind us. The mere sight of him still made me feel as if my blood had dropped what it was doing and rushed back to my heart.

  “My boy,” my dad said, taking his hands off me to clap Gregory warmly on the shoulder. “Tell me, truly. Seeing that beautiful creature over there—” He pointed across the street to Mercedes.

  “Da-ad!” I was shocked.

  “She looks lovely,” Gregory agreed easily. I searched him, as I constantly did these days, for any trace of resentment. As usual, I found none. “The Sterling Girls do everything in style,” he added generously.

  I took his hand and squeezed it. Gregory had moved back in with Hitchens and me on one condition: I had to agree to entertain the possibility of changing my mind. Not that I would change my mind, but I would no longer define myself as one hundred percent definitely certain that I was not having children. And so, for Gregory, I had done this. For his sake, I had bid farewell to the summer camp of certainty. In the annals of sacrifices, this was not a headliner, but it was a mental readjustment of major proportions for me.

  To my surprise, rather than making me anxious or angry, a part of me that I hadn’t even known was coiled unwound with this newly adopted outlook. Even my friendship with Macy became easier; whereas before I’d been suspicious of her morally commendable motives for passing on parenthood—afraid of intimacy!—I now understood that my suspicion was rooted in discomfort about my own decisions. The ability to make peace with uncertainty, to befriend open endings, had brought with it a clearer view of myself, an unanticipated freedom, and a hard-won sense of maturity.

  “Is that a … marshmallow shooter?” Leonard asked, pointing with undisguised admiration to the small catapult at Gregory’s feet. Leonard rarely initiated a conversation, and the fact that he had been magnetically drawn across the length of his living room to do so was notable.

  “Technically, it’s a mini-trebuchet,” Gregory said, winking at me. The thought that I had come so close to driving him away forever made my stomach lurch.

  “Are you two en route to a crusade?” my father inquired.

  “I bet I know where you’re going,” Leonard said breathlessly. “You’re going to the Marshmallow Civil War under the Brooklyn Bridge, aren’t you?” His eyes shone, and it became clear to me that the return to the city had by no means been a sacrifice for him. “I really wanted to go to that,” he said longingly. “You can’t believe how many different kinds of launchers people design out of PVC. If it was me, I’d build a pneumatic cannon—”

  “Maybe next year, Leonard,” I comforted him.

  “Shall we?” Gregory said to me, picking up the launcher and extending his arm. “We still need to buy ammunition.”

  “Are you going to get full-size or mini-marshmallows?” Leonard asked, frowning as he mentally weighed the pros and cons of each.

  Gregory looked at me.

  “We haven’t decided,” I told Leonard happily. “We’re just going to see what we find.”

  Acknowledgments

  I am so grateful to have been given the opportunity to continue Zephyr’s adventures. Kerri Buckley, a young editor who possesses the talents, passion, and work ethic of an old one, made that possible, as did the enthusiasm of Jane von Mehren, Melissa Possick, Kathy Lord, Kelly Chian, Beck Stvan, Caroline Cunningham, Marisa Vigilante, Sonya Safro, Kate Miciak, and the rest of the Random House team. My heartfelt thanks again to my devoted, kind, capable agent, Tracy Brown.

  I find it nearly impossible to write at home, where it is always tempting to take care of just a few little things before settling down to work. And so I thank the generous staff at Babycakes Café and Ken Kraft at The Crafted Kup, in Poughkeepsie, New York, for welcoming me into their establishments and selling me countless cups of coffee. I also thank my husband’s colleagues for not thinking it (too) strange when I showed up, laptop in tow, to have a writing date with my beloved in his office.

  I could not have written this book were it not for my children’s babysitter, Jackie Ryan, a generous, thoughtful, funny young woman, and a superb storyteller in her own right. Knowing that my other creations were being loved, entertained, and cared for was the difference between writing and not writing.

  Enormous thanks to Tom Comiskey, my former colleague at SCI (now part of New York City’s DOI), who answered all my strange questions about Glocks and subpoenas and a dozen other minutiae thoroughly and quickly. I twisted many details to suit my purposes: Any factual inaccuracies are my own and usually deliberate.

  As always, my boundless gratitude to my mother—whose prompt answers to my leftfield questions constitute the bulk of my legal “research”—and to my late father and to my in-laws, who make this writing life feasible. Once again, my friends have let me use (and twist) their stories: thanks especially to Jessica Orkin and Anna Gross for helping with details ranging from the fashionable to the medical, to Amanda Robinson for doing a thorough read way o’er yonder in Scotland, to Nava Atlas, Jenny Nelson, and Gail Upchurch for being my new writing buddies, and to Tracy Bagley White for making me feel at home away from our homes.

  And of course, thanks to my truest love, Sacha Spector. I still can’t believe my good fortune.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DAPHNE UVILLER is a third-generation Greenwich Villager who currently lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and their two children. She is the author of Super in the City and co-editor of the anthology Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. A former editor at Time Out New York, Daphne’s reviews, profiles, and articles—ranging in topic from Jewish firefighters to breast reductions—have been published in the Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsday, The Forward, New York magazine, Oxygen, Allure, and Self, for which she used to write an ethics column. Daphne is a member of the SheWrites.com advisory board.