CHAPTER THREE
“Would you like to come with us to the club?” she said, disturbing the silence. “We’re meeting Letty and her fiancée there, we have to go over some things before tomorrow.”
“You seem very involved with this wedding?” Carver couldn’t help responding.
Nora shrugged and turned the page of her newspaper. “We’re giving them some help. We got them in with the club, and we’re paying a large portion of the venue fee, as a gift.”
He was taken aback. “Why?”
“Why not? My sister and her husband weren’t able to help them much.” Nora sipped her own coffee. “You know what terrible investors they are. They almost lost their house in the dot-com bubble.”
“I’m just surprised.” Carver picked up his own mug and focused his gaze at it as he said, “It’s a gay wedding. I didn’t think you’d be this supportive.” His voice shrank as he spoke.
“Well, it’s not ideal,” Nora said. “But Letty’s a lovely girl, a lot of men were interested, it’s not like she was going begging. And it’s not like she had adverse experiences with men. She wasn’t scared off them, or anything.”
“Jesus, Mom.”
“I’m just saying, I think, you know — this really is just how she wants things, so, I’m happy to leave it there.
Things are different now than they were a decade ago.
I mean, it’s the law of the land now, and I’m an officer of the court, I respect that.
I’ll admit to being initially shocked, but it’s been four years of this and the sky hasn’t come down. No one is marrying their dog.”
Carver cleared his throat and drank some coffee, then moved over to the breakfast bar and sat diagonally across from her. Nora peered at him over her reading glasses.
“And she’s not my daughter,” she added.
His heart palpitated. “Right.”
“I know she’s making life more difficult for herself, but what can you do? She was always tough, and headstrong, so I guess she can handle it.” Nora was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know how they plan to have children.”
“Buy sperm,” Carver said.
She winced. “That’s just so clinical. I don’t even like that you two froze embryos… Dozens of grandchildren trapped in a freezer.”
“I know you don’t think those are your grandchildren.”
“Of course not, but if you defrost one and use it, it becomes my grandchild, and I worry I’ll always think of it as freezer-burned.”
Carver drank more coffee. “I’ll come with you to the club, sure,” he said. He needed something to do.
“Good,” Nora said, smiling. “You seem more chipper this morning.”
“I guess,” said Carver, knowing it was because he had just taken a stimulant.
She opened the Times to a middle page and shook out the wrinkles. “Your father’s coming too, and your friend Scott.”
Carver’s stimulated mind slammed into a brick wall. “Scott?”
“Yes, he’ll be playing live music, he needs to bring them all his things and do a sound check.
” She chuckled. “He drives that stuff around in this terrible van. It’s comically old, I’m impressed it still runs.
He drove it here from New Jersey — did you know he’s in Jersey now?
Only about thirty minutes from you, I think.
I told him I’m surprised you two haven’t gotten together since high school, but he said you’re both just so busy. ”
Carver, dry-mouthed, said nothing.
“He’s a nice boy,” Nora said.
“Is he?” Carver said. “If he were your son, would you say that?”
“No, if he were my son I would tell him to get a haircut and a real job and pay his back taxes, but he’s someone else’s responsibility, thank God,” she laughed. “Though his parents weren’t exactly hands-on, as I’m sure you remember. I’m not surprised he didn’t end up going to college.”
Carver gave her a gesture in between a shrug and a nod.
“Apparently he barely sees them these days.” Nora set her paper down and turned to her right, in the direction of the dining room, looking through the windows there which peered out over the pool and poolhouse.
“You know, I think his heart’s in the right place.
A good woman might do him a lot of good.
When I asked if he’s seeing anyone, he implied to me that he’s had mostly flings, nothing serious.
He’s good-looking, and he spends a lot of time on the road, so it makes sense, but I don’t know if that’s ever made anyone actually happy. ”
Carver finished his coffee and got to his feet. “I’m gonna go ask Lillian if she wants to come with us,” he said.
“Good,” Nora said.
While Scott drove separately in his terrible van, the Novacks made their way to the club in Doug’s beloved black Range Rover.
Carver stared out the window for the duration of the very familiar drive, in order to reap the benefits of his mother’s unceasing patter on what had changed in the six months since they’d been here for Christmas.
“We’re thinking about selling Merriweather and leaving the yacht club, actually,” Nora said as they drove by it.
Carver scanned for interesting watercraft in the marina, but the same old sailboats and yachts bobbed on the water.
“We hardly ever take her out anymore, and they did this hideous revision to the clubhouse. Carver, I tell you, these people have completely lost their minds. They never should have made Gary Dodd commodore. I wish your father had taken another run at it.”
“I served my time,” Doug said, slowing the car to a stop and peering over his left shoulder as they came to a yield sign at the lip of a wooded area.
“And you were excellent at it.”
“I don’t think our friends agreed,” Doug said. “I got the finances under control, but I never got any credit for that. They just wanted to win regattas and drink.”
“And now a decade on, the finances are a mess again,” Nora said.
“Well, that’s what I’m saying.”
“We like our yacht club,” Lillian said, glancing across the backseat at Carver.
“Well, of course, NYYC is the big kahuna,” Nora said. “How did you two get in, were you referred? I know you don’t race much. Or at all.”
Carver roused from his hot-eyed modafinil stupor and said, “Lillian could get in anywhere.”
“When we applied, I did tell them that I raced in college and might pick it up again,” Lillian said. “But, yeah, it’s because of my family. Whenever I go somewhere like that, I realize I know everyone, and then they let me in because they already know me.”
“That’s nice,” Nora said, with faint longing.
“It’s not very American, I guess,” Lillian admitted. “But it benefits me enormously.”
Nora turned and grinned at her. “Can you get rid of Gary Dodd?”
Lillian laughed. “In two phone calls, but only if you want him dead.”
“No, no, that’s alright.”
Once they arrived at the club, it became obvious that Carver and Lillian were extraneous to this mission.
They reunited with Letty (who was inexplicably happy to see Carver, and hugged him) and she introduced them to Sana, a pretty tomboyish waif in glasses who surprised Carver by being apparently Middle Eastern.
He had never thought of his parents as cross-burning bigots, but them helping to bankroll an interracial lesbian wedding would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, or even ten.
There was a time in his childhood when it was a big deal that multiple Jewish families had joined this very country club.
It was hard to tell exactly what had changed, other than everything all at once.
He felt unmoored from basic truths, and floated around the room like a balloon while his family and the country club staff talked about weather forecasts and china rentals.
Lillian seemed to be having a good time for no particular reason, all sunglasses and hair and teeth, pulling the conversational load for both of them.
In a far corner of the high-ceilinged, numerously-windowed and therefore drafty reception hall, Scott stood on a small raised stage setting up amps and other equipment while conversing with a teenager in a dark green Bitterfeld Country Club staff shirt.
Scott occasionally looked over at them, but avoided looking at Carver, which was irritating.
He did want Scott to think of him as attractive, he was aware of that much, but he desperately wanted to believe it was for the same reason that he wanted Scott to think of him as successful, happy, fit, well-groomed, drowning in money, drowning in pussy, drowning in Armani, Botox, pills, drowning in modafinil sweat, just drowning, drowning, Scott look at me I’m drowning. In my Armani.
Back inside the conversation he was ostensibly a part of, Sana was explaining her job to Doug.
Carver immediately grasped from context that she was a biomedical engineer (his dilettante interest in medicine had driven him to the healthcare division at Blackbrick PE, while Lillian arrived via interest in all the money to be harvested from aging boomers) but his father was mentally trapped in the first Clinton administration and had assumed she was a software engineer due solely to how much software she used.
“Well, I don’t write any of it,” Sana explained. “Sometimes I write small programs for specific tasks, that’s all.”
Doug looked genuinely fascinated. “But you only make ninety a year?” he said, and caught a reproachful look from Nora for the crime of being specific about money.
“There’s less money in it than people think, actually,” Sana said. “A lot of what I work on might take a decade or more to come to market.”
“What about VC or PE money?” Lillian said. “Carver and I have biomedical startups in our portfolio.”
“There is that,” Sana said, nodding. “But — no offense — a lot of that money rushes into the sexy companies that work on stuff like life extension therapies and neural interfaces. We’re focused more on regenerative medicine.
It can be hard to get investors interested in treating blindness when they aren’t blind and don’t want to imagine being blind.
” She shrugged. “I might be talking out of my ass, though, I’m not in fundraising or sales. I look at my computer all day.”