Golden Days by Carolyn See

Author:Carolyn See [See, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520918306
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2020-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

“Don’t lose this,” Hal said to me. “My grandmother gave it to my father just before she died. I think you ought to have it.” I found out later that he carried those chains by the gross in his car, and that, yes, they were real gold. He’d never done a day’s work in his life; he said he was too busy. “I can’t even get around to getting the newspapers out of the back seat of my car! I can’t even get my taxes straightened out! I can’t even keep the rents up on my building!” For he owned a false-Tudor-building business in the Valley.

We drank about fourteen more champagnes; he’d made sure to find where the real stock was—upstairs in Mrs. Jacobson’s own sitting room, in a small refrigerator next to the chaise longue—and we reclined, or he did, on that elegant piece of period furniture, while I sat on a Louis XVI chair and listened to bits and pieces of his nonexistent career, which he spoke of with ardor and perfect belief. But his real interest was food, as his round figure confirmed.

"I know you eat at Michael’s, but do you eat at Scratch? Do you know that when that woman who owns it had a miscarriage she was back in the next day in a nightgown and overcoat to see what they were…”

“Her husband,” I interrupted eagerly, “has invented a, what do you call it, a French fry dispenser…”

"And a foot mobile. No, a mobile foot!”

In the very old days, there was a word you never hear now, a doppelganger, a human, man or woman, who walks and talks and thinks like you. Hal, Prince Hal, I came to call him, was that for me. And though I had the job, it was his generosity, his refusal to care about anything at all, that I came to count upon, and as the days ahead grew—darker—I want you to believe that I hardly noticed. But why do I lie to you, especially now? Of course I noticed.

Waking with a start at five in the morning, even earlier, reaching over for Skip to find myself alone, I’d get up, and after resentfully going to the bathroom, feel my way down the stairs because the sun wasn’t up yet. I’d go into Skip’s own room without knocking, and he’d be hunched over his tickertape, in the dark; his bathrobe drawn tight around him. His face, when he looked at me, grey.

“What is it?” I'd demand, irritably, not wanting to know at all, middle-aged lady nagging an elderly man, and he’d twist his face into a smile. “It can only help us,” he’d say. “Our investments are safe, and you only have daughters. And Deeky is safe.” But the sadness on the face of that good man would break your heart—if you had a heart. So I protected myself the way we all protected ourselves in those very first months. We watched the news, and hardened our hearts, and I… I hardly thought about it.

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