Wild Game My Mother, Her Lover, and Me - Adrienne Brodeur Page 0,79
a life plan instead: I would move to New York City and attempt to enter the literary world. Jack and I would test-drive a long-distance marriage. It was time for me to chase my own life and find a path away from the wreck.
* * *
I can still remember getting out of the cab in New York City and walking toward my new home, toward this strange new life, as if in slow motion. I’d sublet the apartment sight unseen from a friend of a friend. It was on Lexington Avenue in Murray Hill, catty-corner to a Curry in a Hurry restaurant and over a frame shop. Cars honked. Pedestrians marched determinedly. A homeless man sat cross-legged on my stoop next to a cat and a litter of kittens, one of which I would adopt in the coming weeks.
I started up the stairs lugging a single large suitcase. When I made it to the third-floor walkup and stood in front of my door, I took a deep breath. I slid the key into the lock and turned it; it clicked, then released. I pushed the door, and it swung open. From where I stood, I could behold almost all five hundred square feet of my new home. First, I felt the pleasantly exhausted sensation of having pulled into my driveway after being on a long road trip. Then I nearly choked on the feeling of arriving home.
Twenty-three
In the early YEARS of Malabar and Ben’s marriage, they went on the lavish trips she’d dreamed of: honeymooning in Italy, chartering a gulet to cruise the Turkish coast, bird watching in South Africa. My mother wrote travel pieces about their adventures that appeared in the New York Times and glossy magazines, and Ben glowed with pride at her accomplishments. At long last happily married, Malabar was ready to hang up her apron. She still adored haute cuisine but now far preferred eating out to cooking at home, and her new husband was more than happy to accommodate her desires. Although Ben still hunted at every opportunity, the wild-game cookbook languished. It never found a publisher or a proper home, though it had unquestionably served its intended purpose and then some.
Their first marital project was a renovation of my mother’s Cape house that nearly doubled its footprint. On the ground floor, they added a master bedroom suite and an enormous rectangular living room, designed specifically to house a prized oriental rug of Ben’s. One of the long walls was composed of sliding glass doors; the opposite one was originally intended to showcase Ben’s hunting trophies, his dozens of heads, antlers, tusks, and horns, all expertly mounted. But in the end, Malabar decided she preferred fine art to animal parts, and Ben’s trophies were rerouted to a dehumidified room in the basement created for just that purpose.
If Malabar was euphoric about her own life, she was far less pleased with mine. By moving to New York, I was jeopardizing the uniquely modern family she had created—mother and daughter married to father and son. According to her, Ben was upset for Jack and concerned he would see less of his son without me to help lure him back east several times a year. Malabar did not want her husband to be unhappy.
On her first visit to my new home, my mother made a point of allowing me to see my shabby apartment through her eyes. Always discerning when it came to life’s fineries, she stepped across the threshold and her gaze drifted to paint-chipped corners, across putty-colored electrical outlets and grimy windows, and onto the solitary light fixture in the kitchen, the base of which held a couple of dead flies.
“I know,” I said. “It needs work. A good cleaning. Some TLC.”
Malabar looked into the windowless alcove that was my bedroom and at the two stacks of books, all from Margot, that served as makeshift nightstands. She exhaled audibly.
“I plan to build floor-to-ceiling shelves over here,” I said, gesturing toward the entry area. “And once my books have a permanent home, I’ll get real nightstands.”
But even as I spoke, my mother’s attention moved again. She looked past the main living area to the kitchen beyond, off of which was a bolted door leading to a rusted fire escape where I planned to grow potted tomatoes in the spring. Under Malabar’s scrutiny, the courtyard below transformed into a junkyard, and the single large tree, whose leafy branches I envisioned would paint my windows green in the spring,