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Musical Chairs
Chapter 1
Sheila is a resident of Vieques, a
published, professional writer, and also a real estate broker
DECEMBER 10, 1991
Roberta
Palmer waits until it is almost morning before she calls her stepdaughter.
It is not quite light. The night sky is strewn with patches of dawn,
blackness giving way to the relentless pressure of daybreak. Roberta, always
an early riser, rarely misses this reassuring moment of transition at the
break of day.
Joan senses
the vibration of the phone before it rings. She has been awake for several
minutes, contemplating coffee, wondering if it will snow. She snatches the
phone from the night table before the first peal ends, as if silencing an
offensive noise.
"Hello," she
says, expecting a wrong number or the click of a hang-up.
"Joan, it's
Roberta."
"Roberta!
Something is wrong; her stepmother would not call this early for nothing.
"Joan,
there's no easy way to say this, Roberta hesitates, coughs, she is choking
on the words. Joan, I am so sorry, your father passed away last night. I'm
so sorry. I waited to call, I didn't want to call you earlier, I thought you
should..."
Passed
away? Joan questions, He told me, just a couple of days ago he said he
was fine, he said I didn't have to worry...".
A couple
of days ago, Roberta thinks, a lifetime ago.
"Yes,
well, he was sicker than any of us know," Roberta says, "perhaps it is for
the best, he didn't suffer."
The clich
sticks in her throat and Roberta wonders as she utters this first facile lie
if the others would flow so easily.
"What do
you want me to do?" Joan asks coldly.
"Take the
first shuttle down, take a taxi to the house; I'm not sure if I can send
Arnold..."
"All right,
Roberta, if thats what you want. I'll be on the first shuttle. Oh, God, I
can't believe this. I keep wanting to ask you if you're sure, isn't that
insane?" Joan whispers.
"It's a
terrible shock, Joan; I know just how you feel. Hurry, it will be good for
us to be together."
"See you
later Joan replies, hanging up the phone.
Roberta
clicks the phone to "'off but does not replace it in its cradle. There are
so many people to notify, she has made a list. She isn't sure of the
protocol. Is it too early to call Important People, David's Congressional
Colleagues, the Secretary of State?
She has been
scribbling a list of people to call on the back of an envelope. But now, as
she tries to decipher her notes, she is uncertain how to proceed.
Roberta has
been up all night watching her husband die. She is staving off grief with
doses of memory. When she feels herself succumbing, she reaches for more of
that potent medicine. She knows the supply is not limitless, but hopes it
will be enough to see her through for a little while.
Roberta
watches the freezing rain through the French doors leading to the patio of
the Georgetown townhouse where she and David have breakfast on the mornings
he is in Washington. Throughout the autumn into winter, even when it is so
chilly that Roberta resorts to heavy sweaters and scarves, they warm their
hands on hot mugs of coffee, enjoying these rare moments of privacy.
Large
drops of rain splatter on the patio and ricochet against the glass doors.
Roberta watches the rain from the room she thinks of as her office, a small
sitting room off the living room. Her coffee is cold. The wind is whipping
up the puddles outside, creating small whirlpools.
She
glances at the clock on her desk. David has been dead for two hours. The
only people she has called are Malcolm Marshall, David's close friend and
lawyer, and Joan. Malcolm is taking care of the details, of having David's
body removed. Her task is to call people.
Calling
Joan has sapped her; she is exhausted. Joan is her responsibility now. She
is afraid of Joan. Afraid of her sad eyes, her raw needs. Roberta knows that
Joan has been neglected for too long. She has tried to befriend her, but
Joan is immune to her stepmother's charm, unimpressed with Roberta's
spasmodic overtures. What Joan needed she could only get from David. She is
too proud to accept substitutions. If her father fails her, and he does, she
will go it alone.
God only knows what she is feeling now, Roberta thinks. She
would like to comfort her stepdaughter, to hold her. She knows that Joan
can be harsh, that she has a cutting tongue. Perhaps now, Roberta thinks,
now that David is dead, she and I can be friends. If Joan will bend a little
we can manage this together.
Roberta's head is throbbing; she hasn't eaten for a day. The
thought of food makes her nauseous, but she is hungry. She has always been
ravenous in the morning.
She
pictures David sitting across from her, always impeccably dressed, and
having his monotonous spartan breakfast of half glass of grapefruit juice,
dry wheat toast and black coffee. She feels gluttonous next to him, enjoying
as she does sweet melon, an Entermann's fat free blueberry muffin, and
coffee with half and half, her one daily dietary indulgence.
It is a perfect picture, the handsome couple on their patio at breakfast,
exchanging sections of the Washington Post. A photo op. People Magazine used
it years ago when they did a story on Washington's new power couple.
In her own way, Roberta is as famous as David. Despite the fact that she
hasn't modeled in years, people remember her. She is frozen in time, locked
in the public's memory as if she is ageless. She still receives letters
requesting pictures, seeking advice, urging her to come out of retirement,
as if the clock has stopped, as if she is still the same young girl.
During the years of her celebrity, there develops between Roberta and her
public a special kinship. She is ostentatiously imperfect, unafraid to
expose her flaws, able to laugh at her blemishes, mock her constant battle
with diets.
With her unconventional good looks, her artless manner, Roberta captivates
a public bored with perfect faces and arrogant celebrities. Roberta is
approachable and vulnerable. She allows the public to share in her delight
and surprise at the turn of events in her life. If it can happen to me, she
often says, it can happen to anyone.
Nothing seemed more unlikely when Roberta Fenn was a shy uncertain girl
than the emergence, years later, of the celebrity model known only as
ROBERTA.
Roberta is a born listener. Both her parents are deaf.
Roberta learns to sign as she learns to speak. Her parents are teachers for
the deaf. Their lives revolve around teaching and political action for deaf
rights. Her parents read lips, but prefer signing. In Roberta's silent
home, the nuances of life are not overlooks. With conversation limited,
other senses develop. An especially keen sense of vision and smell,
sensitivity to the unspoken, to mood and temperament. She believes too that
she has a sure instinct for judging character, she is proud of that.
In the soft spring evenings of 1964, when she is twelve, Roberta remembers
flying down the stoop of their Brooklyn apartment house, swallowing air,
exhilarant but scared, calling out to parents who could not hear "see you
later if you're lucky."
She
ran to the corner lot, where she joined the boys choosing up sides for a
softball game. Roberta is accepted because she has a remarkably controlled
pitching arm and she is wise enough to conceal her excitement with casual
gestures of good fellowship. One false move on her part and she would have
been unwelcome. She sweeps her long hair under a cap turns backwards (a few
tendrils, to be sure, artfully fell on her forehead), borrows her father's
athletic socks (turned down the requisite three times), wore her most
disreputable jeans. She is all business. No hint of flirtation in her deep
squint as she hesitates for just a moment, her bud breasts outlined against
a white T shirt, concentrating on the pitch. Everything is innocent, even
the sweat drop she catches with her tongue are sweet. Standing there on the
mound, licking her lips (it helps her fix the pitch) she has the feeling she
is beating the guys at their own game.
Disguised as one of the boys, she is accepted.
Looking back she wonders if her memory is unduly sentimental. Werent those
hugs and victory smacks just a bit self conscious after all? For two years
her team is the neighborhood champion. Then when she is fourteen, she stops.
It becomes clear to her that if she wants to have any girlfriends, she will
have to stop playing ball with the boys.
One day she joins the girls behind the fence, cheering from
the sidelines. Her former teammates wave and calls to her. One is dispatched
to ask her to play. "No," she nods "can't anymore".
At the end of that game, as they are leaving the field,
Mike Jackson, the captain, casually doffs his cap, bows deeply from the
waist and tosses the ball to Roberta. She lifts her arm in a salute of
thanks. She understands the rules of the game. She is a girl who does not
overstep boundaries.
Now, thirty years later, Roberta yearns for such simple solutions. She is
unprepared for the pain she knows she must confront, for the loneliness, the
desolation of this new role as widow. She wonders if she has lost her
touch. The curtain has been raised; she is center stage once again. This
time, however, there is no rehearsal, there will be no retakes. There is no
diffuse lighting to soften her image, no possibility for air brushing. She's
all alone and she has to get it right the first time.
Her years as a model fine tune Roberta's uncompromising
ability to see herself as an observer. While she does not flinch at a
critical scrutiny of her appearance, she is not yet ready to undertake a
similar audit of her inner resources.
Roberta is
a born again beauty, embraced at a certain moment in time by a fickle
public's revisionist perception of style. She regards her success as a
fluke. In fact she never fully understood it, and she certainly never trusts
it.
Roberta,
who in her peak year appears as a regular guest on Around New York, hosts a
weekly women's roundtable on fashion on public television, is the
spokeswomen for Cavalcade Cosmetics, and appears on the cover of several
women's magazines, was never a conventional beauty.
For
one thing her teeth are slightly crooked with that now famous gap between
her two front incisors. As a girl she develops the habit of casually pushing
her tongue out between those two teeth trying to fill in the space. She
never smiles broadly, but the pressure of her tongue resting on the inside
of her upper teeth forces her cheeks to puff out slightly. This results in
what one critic later celebrates as a delicious wispy latent smile."
Her long,
lanky look so richly praised when she is modeling was not well regarded when
she is growing up. Then she is merely skinny and tall. Her hair, that
gorgeous honey bush which is copied by thousands of women, has been tortured
into braids by her mother in an effort to subdue that unruly mop.
With her
tongue darting around behind those uneven front teeth and wisps of silky
curls hair popping from asymmetrical braids, she stands in front of the
bathroom mirror in despair. No amount of well meaning consolation from her
mother -"You'll grow out of it," her mother signs. ( What? What is there to
grow out of?), or bumbling compliments from her father, "it's brains not
beauty that counts in this world, he signs. "I'm not that smart" she signs
back.
Roberta
lives in a silent world. She listens to people chatter, but when she enters
into conversation she invariably feels ridiculous. Either she told too much,
went on about some small incident until she saw the other's eye glaze over,
or she is terse, unable to articulate her feelings or her sense of things.
She believes she is unremarkable and she hates that. She tries every
artifice she can afford, padded bras, hair straightener, and waist cinches
so tight she has difficulty breathing. She roams the corridors of
Bloomingdales for exotic makeup to draw attention away from her teeth. They
told her, those legions of perfectly complected cosmetic saleswomen, to
emphasize her eyes.
She
stoops to diminish her height, shovels on blemish cream to cover freckles.
She bleaches the hair on her arms and her upper lip, hopping around the room
waving her arms to cool the acid sting. Of course she shaves her legs. Her
right leg still has a faint scar running the length of her shinbone.
At thirteen she starts menstruating and requires glasses
for distance.
She keeps her objectives simple.
She wants a husband, children, a home fills with sound. She
does not indulge much in fantasy, she respects her limitations.
She is not ambitious, or so she believes. She has
collaborated in her career, been an accomplice in her marriage. Everything
is accidental, her success, her marriage to David. She credits herself for
hard work, for an ability to seize the moment. Still, it is all too easy,
she thinks again, as she watches the sleet pound against the glass. Always
on the sidelines of my own life, a non responsible partner. A career
dependent upon the whim of public approval, then, until a few days ago, a
marriage in which she hovers on the periphery, always wanting more, unsure
of how to stimulate in her husband an intimacy that is illusive.
There is between Roberta and David, a bond of trust and understanding, the
warmth of shared experience, the pleasure of relaxed companionship. There is
love, sometimes passion. She blames herself for wanting more, for seeking a
perfect union of body and soul. In search of that union, she became
compliant. She thought that might work. She is soft and gentle, tender and
sweet, reassuring David of her love. But their marriage remains a blend of
its parts, what Roberta wants is fusion.
When that fails to produce results, or results so evanescent they slip
through her grasp, she tries it another way. Sexy and confrontational,
brassy and aggressive. Not really her style, but she is, after all, a
professional. For years she lay in wait, watching for an opportunity to
sneak up on her marriage, to find a way in.
Finally she simply relaxes in his embrace, allows herself to be comforted by
his version of love, determined to quash any lingering discontent of her
own.
Roberta hears the front doorbell, they have come for David, she thinks.
Morning has officially started, the milk and the paper delivery, the sound
of cold engines struggling to turn over, the grinding of the garbage truck.
On the base of the phone, she notices that all six lines are lit. Malcolm
would have notified the press, all of that is about to begin.
Soon people will arrive. David's staff, the press,
perhaps some friends. And Joan, of course. Joan will be here soon. Joan is
the one she is worried about. She will have to be very careful around Joan.
She has only a few moments more to savor her loss alone. She wants to feel
the raw pain of grief, to moan, to wail before she is subjected to sympathy,
must endure the clichs and platitudes of condolence. I could easily become
hysterical, she thinks; let it slip over her like a smooth, metal shield
protecting her from the well meaning, the compassionate, and the curious.
But if she allows it to start, how will she ever stop?
She is still in her robe, she must dress. She will not allow herself to be
seen this way. She feels lightheaded and dizzy. As if she has just stepped
off an airplane after 20 hours of flying, muscles sore and cramped, unsure
of her footing, stumbling around on foreign territory. Disoriented and
bewildered, Roberta pushes herself up, leaning on the desk for balance. This
is no time to start crying, she thinks, noticing that the rain is letting
up.
Taking a
few steps to the French doors, Roberta rests her head against the cool
glass. It is only drizzling now, the puddles of water on the patio
glistening, reflecting the rays breaking through the brightening sky.
Surely,
she thinks, this horror is some elaborate mistake. It can not be true, that
David is dead. Perhaps I am suffering from some profound delusion, perhaps I
am mad.
.
Disappointments, failures and and loss in the past always has hidden within
them the seeds of a better day the potential for reversal and resurgence. At
worst, things are a setback, a failure, an obstacle to be overcome.
Too
tired to hold them back, she feels hot tears streak her cheeks, an
oppressive hopelessness begins to overwhelm her.
Common,
kiddo, she says to herself, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her robe, stop
sniveling.
One thing
she knows. All the claptrap about death, all the ritual, the polite intoning
of the clergy, the poetic babble of inevitability, the ludicrous notion of
death as friend, as simply another phase of life, are all wrong.
Death is no
friend. It is the ultimate contradiction of life, the definitive enemy.
Roberta does not believe in an after life. David is gone truly and forever.
Roberta
knows too that her cup of sorrow is laced with anger. For the moment,
however, she must turn her attention to what she will wear, what she will
say. She must prepare her face for the world to see.
She finds a
tissue mashed in the pocket of her robe, and gratefully blows her nose. For
just a moment, this absurd act of clearing her nasal passage, makes her feel
better.
I'll have
plenty of time, Roberta thinks, as she goes upstairs to dress, to grapple
with the demons. All the time in the world to confront the ghosts.
