American Innovations Page 5

  The daughter said she thought that sounded good.

  Then they were quiet for a bit. Then the mother began to talk about how a friend of hers had cervical cancer; she’d never had children, the mother explained of her friend; it’s a risk to one’s health to never have children. I pray to God that you will have a child. You are a difficult person, but you can get pregnant, you can even just go to a clinic these days and get pregnant. There’s nothing wrong with that. The daughter put some sugar in her coffee, even though she almost never put sugar in her coffee. The mother reminded the daughter of the story of the cousin who had gotten pregnant, most likely from a clinic, the cousin who people said was a lesbian but, the mother said, was probably just never lucky with men, but it didn’t matter, because the cousin was so happy now, even though she had always been a very ill-tempered person before, and the mother said that she (the mother) would pay any medical expenses there might be, that she would help the daughter.

  The daughter didn’t respond.

  The mother told the daughter that it was interesting that she (the daughter) had chosen that day to wear a green shirt and green shorts, all green like that, together. The mother reiterated that the daughter really should try making the vegetarian chopped liver dip. Which is low in calories while being very tasty. The daughter said, All you care about is money and weight; and you give me all this advice; but I’m thinner than you and I make more money than you.

  The daughter had been rejected for a mortgage earlier that day; or, rather, she had not been rejected, but she had been approved for a mortgage of only thirty-five thousand dollars. Which was grossly insufficient. The rejection stemmed partly from the daughter’s unstable income—her income was unstable because she had not followed the mother’s career advice—and partly from recent crises in the mortgage industry, which had led to the lender’s not accepting 1099 income in the same way as W-2 income. Now the apartment/asset was absolutely unbuyable without the mother’s help.

  The mother restated that the daughter should go back to her husband. The mother wanted to help the couple buy a nice place to live. A place that would also be a nice investment property, a condominium that they could rent out when they needed a new and larger place to live, because of children. Yes, the purchase should be of a condominium and not of a cooperative, though the mother acknowledged that the daughter said that she tended not to like the newer condominium buildings, but she knew that the daughter just felt pressure to express that taste—for older buildings—which was not in fact really her taste. She was just being forced into that taste by trends that would pass, just as this rough spot in the marriage would pass. If they, the daughter and her husband, had a nice place to live, then they would find happiness, because it’s hard to find happiness when you don’t have space to breathe and she wanted her daughter to breathe.

  You were very right, the daughter said, when you used to tell me that A Woman Should Always Be Financially Independent.

  I didn’t think you ever listened to me. I’m honored, the mother said.

  The daughter said to the mother that the money that was gifted to her by her mother was really the mother’s money and not hers, it was true. But she felt that the money should either be her money or not be her money, and that she could not tolerate any in-betweens and she could not tolerate any health or fashion advice, either—that was it. The mother said she wasn’t giving advice, just love. The daughter left. The mother paid the bill.

  In February 2011, the mother and the daughter made a plan to meet again for coffee. It had been many months of meetings “for coffee” and very little accord. The mother had said that she would bring the checkbook for the account where the profits from the asset/apartment were kept. The daughter showed up to the meeting.

  What do you think “homey” means? the mother asked.

  Why are you asking me that? the daughter asked.

  You’re so suspicious, the mother said. You think the worst of me. I give up, the mother said. Then she said, It’s just something that was on my mind because of a client I had. A while ago. He was Swedish. He was looking to buy a studio in New York, because he couldn’t handle the Swedish winter anymore and so he wanted to winter in New York. Which sounds odd, to winter in New York, but that’s what he said, that he just needed a place to lay his head, and that it could be tiny, it just needed to have lots of natural light. I understood him, the mother said. He also said he liked New York because it’s inexpensive, which sounded funny to me, like the wintering, but that was what he said, that New York was cheap. So I took him to a beautiful studio with windows on three sides. Not just ordinary windows but really tall ones, and the apartment was clean and beautiful with good appliances and a gorgeous floor and, like I said, so much light; it was really such a good value, and I thought that I myself would be happy to live there, and I was so happy with what I was showing him. He only stayed for a minute, though. I can’t live here, he said. It doesn’t feel homey. That was the word he used: “homey.” I thanked the listing broker, and then when we were back outside, I said to the Swede—I liked the guy, so I was honest with him—I said, You don’t know how fortunate you are to see a place like this in Manhattan. It’s a tremendous value. I’m just telling you, because you’ll see other places, and they won’t be as nice, and I don’t want you to be disappointed. I’m not, he said, going to buy a place until I find exactly what I want. What you’ll learn, I said, is that this is the city of compromises. I’m not talking about you, the mother said to the daughter. I know you think I am, but I’m not. I wanted to tell you about the second apartment I showed the Swede. When I showed him another place, he brought a friend with him. You should have seen his friend. He had this very long, very black hair. And pale, pale skin. He looked like a man you see in advertisements for cigarettes, or speedboats. I mean, he looked like a racecar driver. And he was a racecar driver! This is my friend, the Swede said to me, the mother said. He just got back from a racecar competition in Abu Dhabi, the Swede explained. So I mentioned that you had been to Abu Dhabi.

  I haven’t been to Abu Dhabi, the daughter said.

  I thought you had.

  No.

  Oh.

  I was in Dubai, though.

  I thought they were the same.

  No.

  I said to the racecar driver that I had heard that Abu Dhabi was a ghost town, with all those vacant apartments.

  That’s Dubai, the daughter said.

  Oh. It’s Dubai that has a lot of empty apartment buildings?

  Right. Abu Dhabi is supposedly doing pretty well.

  You probably think the Swede and his friend didn’t like me, but they liked me very much, the mother said. Many people like me. They feel good around me. I took the Swede and his dramatic friend to an apartment on Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street. In one of those grand old buildings. Where many people who used to have live-in maids no longer have live-in maids, and so there are these small apartments that used to be maids’ apartments. I thought the Swede might like it. But as soon as I walked into the apartment I felt awful for taking the Swede there. I hadn’t had a chance to preview it. It had looked much better in the pictures. There was just one window, and it was in the corner and was tiny. The place had terrible old furniture, there was an ugly cat there, the floor had rotting parquet. The Swede took a quick walk around; he looked at his racecar driver friend. Now this feels homey, he said. His friend nodded. I was amazed. What does he mean that it feels homey? It was like a puzzle. It stuck with me. It made me think that maybe I’m really missing something, that maybe if I better understood what he meant, then maybe I would be doing better.

  I bet he just likes old buildings, the daughter said. I like old buildings.

  But it was disgusting, the mother said.

  Or maybe it was just that it had furniture. Just that someone lived there.

  I thought about that. And, you know, later the broker from the first apartment called me and asked me for feedback. She asked me what my
client thought. I told her honestly that he hadn’t liked it. But I told her, also honestly, that I thought it was beautiful, and that it was crazy of him not to like it. She asked me what he didn’t like about it, because she was trying to think how she could better market the apartment, because she was having, she said, to be honest, trouble selling it, even though she felt it was well priced. I felt bad for her. She sounded distressed. I told her it’s hard to sell anything right now, even something great. I told her not to worry, that things would turn around.

  Did the Swede buy the maid’s apartment? the daughter asked.

  Oh, in the end, he didn’t buy anything from me, the mother said. He liked me, though. He said I was honest. He didn’t buy anything at all. Instead, he moved to Dubai.

  What?

  He moved to Dubai instead of New York.

  To Dubai? Or to Abu Dhabi?

  I don’t know. Somewhere sunny.

  That’s too bad, the daughter said. I think. About the apartment, I mean. But you have to stop confusing things. That’s why you come to the wrong conclusions. Because you start in the wrong place. So then you’re not really even talking about what you’re talking about, the daughter went on, not really sure what she herself was talking about, and realizing that she had lost track of precisely what it was that she was trying to estimate justly, and why she had imagined that she could.

  AMERICAN INNOVATIONS

  This was in Singapore City, midday in an August. I was visiting my thin, tan, sixty-something non-native-of-Singapore aunt of exceptional math skills who had made her fortune, from near enough to nothing, in spandex and sequin fashions. When I was younger, we had called her Tina Turner because her styling was similar—also, she had once seen Tina Turner in a grocery store in Los Angeles, and they had nodded knowingly at one another, that was the story—but now my aunt seemed smaller, and tamer, if still disturbingly “hot,” considerably more hot than either of her daughters, both now middle-aged and involved in their own relatively less demanding lives, in more prosaic bodies, in other countries. My aunt still shared her mahogany-interiored seven-bedroom house—it was a sixties construction, with lots of obtuse angles, so that you could make right after right after right after right and still not be facing your original direction—with her husband of all those years, although he left for the beach by 5:00 a.m. most days, and she was a night person, and so it was as if she lived alone. After 11:00 p.m., she liked to play bridge online, often with people “in your sorts of time zones.” My aunt told me that not everyone in the online bridge world was very nice; in fact, it was difficult to believe how rude some people could be; really, it was amazing.

  “This guy, we were partners; he opened a heart, and then he rebid two spades over my no-trump—that’s a reverse. Do you understand bidding? It’s like he was going backward. Look, it’s not common. To do that, you’re essentially promising your partner that you have at least sixteen high card points. At least. Are you following? For him to make that bid, he’s saying he’s got long hearts and a really good hand. And then he doesn’t, not at all! We end up in four hearts in a four-two fit. It’s like he’s expecting me to have the hearts, it’s crazy. Everyone else is in a normal three no-trump. So I write to him: ‘Are you drunk or are you stupid?’ ”

  “You said, ‘Are you drunk or are you stupid?’ ”

  “Yes, you can make chatter in the sidebar of the game. There’s a space. I mean, you don’t even play bridge, but even you can understand that he made a ridiculous bid, right? I’ve read six books on bridge; you can trust me, what he did was really idiotic. That’s why I said what I said. Well, then he called me awful names. Just awful. I can’t say the names. And he was the one who made the mistake! I almost didn’t want to play bridge online ever again. And I have some very nice people that I play bridge with. But I almost gave up playing. See, that’s what happens with the Internet. Some people will be amazingly rude.”

  I think I said something about how yes, people could really be people.

  She said something about how I must be jet-lagged.

  “I’m all right,” I said. The main reason I was in Singapore was that a year-and-a-half-long relationship of mine had recently come to an end, and it had seemed natural to transition by visiting a friend who had moved to Hong Kong, and then, already so far, visiting my aunt, too. I wasn’t devastated, though; it wasn’t that kind of breakup; my serial eighteen-month relationships consistently ended amicably, it was just a weird tic of mine, one with which I was fine. It was like, I had been told, I wasn’t a woman.

  “Did I ever tell you,” my aunt asked, “about my September 11th?”

  No, she hadn’t.

  “It was late here, everyone was asleep, and my God, I was lying in bed, and then I noticed this lump, quite big, right here, on my side. I was sure it was cancer. I was sure I was going to die. How could I have not noticed it before?” She went on to say, “It was right here at these low ribs that aren’t full ribs. Normally I would have called my friend Simona, she’s an excellent doctor, you know, but I didn’t think it was right, ringing her late like that. That’s nighttime thinking for you. I’m sure she wouldn’t have minded. But I told myself I would have to make it on my own until the beginning of the next business day. That’s what I was thinking. I couldn’t rest, of course. I went and turned on the television, just to distract myself, to calm myself down. And what’s there? The towers. Can you believe it? I mean, how awful. And they just kept replaying it. I sat there watching it all alone. Well, it wasn’t cancer, the lump. It was just my breast. I mean, the silicone. The implant. It just fell down. Unbelievable, right? That they would put something in you that could do that. I said to the doctors, Just take it out and never give it back to me. I like small breasts now. I used to hate them, but now I like them.”