“Thank you,” Amanda said. “Greta, this is my partner, Francesca.”
Francesca extended her hand to Greta.
“Hello,” she said.
“Greta is our neighbor,” Amanda said. “Her little girl is the one Mom was always going on about.”
“So you’re moving in?” Greta asked.
“For now,” Amanda said. “At least until we are ready to sell. If the market ever turns around.”
Greta felt a small surge of disappointment. It was a feeling that she remembered, acutely, from when she was a girl negotiating the tricky waters of girlhood friendship. At one time female friendship had been paramount to her. She and her friend April had been nearly inseparable until they had moved away to college, and it was only recently that Greta noticed the marked absence of friends in her life—female or otherwise. Her marriage had sufficiently obscured this deficit. Now she craved the intimacy of friends but felt ill equipped to make them. It seemed that her six-year-old daughter was infinitely more skilled than Greta.
“I would love to stay in this neighborhood,” Francesca offered. “It seems perfect for the children.” She looked at Amanda, whose expression remained neutral, and then smiled at Greta. “But you know . . . it’s more complicated for Amanda.”
One of the movers came up and stood hovering behind the women.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said. “When you have a minute?”
Amanda raised her hand to the man. “Be right there,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Greta.” She followed the man back into the house.
Francesca stayed behind. She reached out her thumb and rubbed it across a bright blue smear of paint that had been left by another car.
“Perhaps after we settle a bit, we might have you over for an aperitivo, a drink?” Francesca arched her back with one palm held flat against her sacrum and the other hand spread across her belly like a fan.
“I’d love that,” Greta said.
She drove up the hill to the big empty house. At the top of the driveway, Thinmuffin lay on her back, licking her paws and staring up at the hummingbirds feeding in the overgrown bottlebrush tree. Since they had adopted the cat three years ago, she had managed to kill an astonishing array of birds. Crows, warblers, sparrows, and scrub jays had all fallen prey to the executioner that was their twelve-pound, slightly overweight tabby.
As Greta let herself into the house, she turned and looked at the cat lolling in the sun, watching the hummingbirds hover in the trees above the cat’s half-closed eyes and swishing tail. It was the only avian species that the cat had failed to kill, and it made Greta wonder if animals were capable of understanding futility. Or perhaps, unlike us, they just inherently better understand the importance of timing.
“I’m just disappointed, is all.”
Peter picked the radishes out of his salad and piled them up on the side of his plate. “I thought we were driving up the coast after you dropped Charlotte off.”
Greta swirled the straw around in her iced tea and looked out over the boardwalk to the water. “I’m sorry. I should have told you before. It’s just that—”
“It’s okay,” he interrupted. “I have stuff to do in the apartment anyway. This apartment isn’t going to furnish itself.”
“Let me finish,” Greta said.
After years of altering the way she spoke with Phillip, she found it aggravating now whenever it felt that she was not fully expressing herself. She didn’t like to be interrupted, analyzed, or manipulated—none of which Peter was doing, she hastened to remind herself. She looked back at him and smiled. “I am sorry. I’ve been putting this off, and we really need to talk.”
Peter nodded. “Sure, sure. Of course.” He looked down and pushed the lettuce around and then absently took a bit of radish and chewed on it. Greta wondered why he had pushed all of the radishes onto the corner of his plate. She had assumed that the segregation of food had to do with dislike, the way that Charlotte separated her food, leaving all of the greenery for last in the hopes that Greta wouldn’t notice the offending vegetables.
“I just forget sometimes,” he said.
“Why do you do that?” Greta asked.
Peter looked startled. “What?”
“Smush all of the radishes to the side like that. Do you like them or not?”
“As it happens, I’ve always harbored an intense dislike for them.”
She waited for more. “And?”
“I still do,” he said.
Greta laughed. His face relaxed at the triumph of having elicited the response. His delight in delighting her was a trait that she found alternately charming and galling. It felt at times like she was an audience of one and that a sign was being held up instructing her to applaud.
“I think it’s important to continue to investigate how you feel, what you think,” Peter said. “It changes all the time.”
She rolled her eyes. “O wise one.”
“I am wise, little grasshopper,” he said. He motioned to the waiter for a refill of water.
“What do you always forget?” she asked him.
“What?”
“You said that you always forget something.”
Peter shook his head. “Oh, yeah . . . whatever.”
“Not whatever. What?”
“That you’re married.”
He seemed to be waiting for some kind of reassurance. She knew that he wanted her to tell him that it was not for long, that she didn’t love Phillip. Instead, she said, “It shouldn’t be an all-day thing. We’re going to have coffee while Charlotte is in art class, and then take her to the airport at five. He can take her, but it’s the first time she’s flying by herself and . . .”
“You want to be there,” Peter supplied.
“Yes.” She turned her face to the sun and felt the heat burning along her eyelids, creating strange patterns in her vision. “It’s hard to explain.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. He held out a crust of bread to a mangy-looking pigeon that had landed on the railing. It pecked the crust out of his hands. Immediately a swarm of other pigeons descended upon the bird and the bread, fighting for their share.
At the appointed hour, Phillip waited for Greta in the coffeehouse across from Charlotte’s art class. He tried to focus on the case in front of him, mulling over data that required multiple rereads before he could extract any of its meaning. Discrepancies in the two columns had just begun to appear when Charlotte flew into his arms. He inhaled chlorine and sunscreen as her long, wet hair whipped across his face.
“Daddy!” Her cry was muffled into his neck.
“There’s my girl,” he said. He looked up at Greta, who stood a few paces behind Charlotte. “Hi,” he said.
Greta blinked and said nothing. She pulled up the jeans that were falling down off her hips. It was the thinnest that Phillip had seen her since they had been in college together, but her face had a healthy color. Sprinkled across the bridge of her nose was the band of freckles that always came out when she spent time at the beach. He had overheard Charlotte telling one of her school friends that her mother’s friend had just gotten an apartment on the water, but he had restrained himself from seeking more information.
“I know we’re a few minutes late,” she said, “but there was a highly competitive game of Marco Polo going on. . . .”
Phillip stood up, lifting Charlotte up in his arms. She was too old to be carried this way, but Phillip enjoyed it too much to stop. Charlotte flailed excitedly, her elbow knocking into a man who was carrying a tray of drinks.
“Whoa!” The man steadied his tray.
Phillip lowered Charlotte back to the ground. She scrambled into her father’s seat and placed his sunglasses on her face.
“Charlotte, what do you say?” Greta prompted.
“Sor-ry,” Charlotte told the man.
“Why don’t I just run her over there and I’ll meet you right back here, okay?” Phillip said, reaching out his hand for the sunglasses. With
a precise pout, Charlotte deposited them onto his palm.
Greta draped her jacket on the back of a chair. She sat down and began scrolling through her phone.
“Would you order for me?” Phillip asked.
“I don’t know what you want,” she said, without looking up at him.
“The usual.”
She looked up at him and he saw her eyes flash. “I don’t know what the usual is,” she said.
“I’ll order when I get back,” he said quickly. “Come on, honey,” he said, taking Charlotte’s hand.
Phillip and Charlotte walked across the street to the children’s art studio. He turned and looked at Greta watching them through the window, but her expression was obscured by the sunlight reflecting in the glass.
When he returned, he sat down across from her. She had ordered him a double espresso, and she held a mug of something hot in her hands.
“Thanks,” he said.
“How did she go to class?”
“Fine, fine. There were only two other kids there.”
Greta took a sip of tea. “She hasn’t been so good lately. I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not.” She looked at him, and he braced himself for the accusation. “I think she’s depressed.”
Phillip took a deep breath. He exhaled slowly, taking a moment to compose what he would say. Most conversations with Greta outside a therapist’s office deteriorated in a matter of minutes. It didn’t even have to be about something as important as their daughter. It could be a trivial comment: “I went to the market and they were out of eggs.” This would be followed up by Greta demanding, “Did you ever go shopping with her? Did she cook for you?”
“Charlie doesn’t seem . . . depressed,” he began. “She seems a little angry. Aggressive.”
“Depression is expressed as anger in children,” Greta said. “It’s what her pediatrician said anyway when I took her in for her checkup.”
Phillip removed a sugar packet from the wooden container on the side of the table and poured the contents into the espresso. He stirred it with a wooden stick. “Do you think we should bring her in to talk to someone?”
Greta sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think she’ll go by herself, so we would need to go with her.”
“I figured we would.”
She looked out the window. A woman with five dogs on two leashes navigated her way through families pushing wide colorful strollers down the busy sidewalk. Greta sighed and shook her head.
“This is not how I saw us turning out,” she said. “Our family. You and me.”
“It’s not too late,” Phillip said. “Please, Greta.” He reached across the table and took her hand in his. To his surprise, she allowed her hand to be held for a moment before removing it.
“Your lawyer told mine that once we get through the discovery process . . .” she began. Her eyes filled with tears. He reached for her again, but this time she pushed his hand away. “We need to decide what to do with the . . .” She modulated her voice lower as her eyes darted to the other tables. “Embryos,” she finished quickly.
“I know,” Phillip said.
“Did you get that form I sent you?”
“I did,” Phillip took a sip of coffee. It tasted even more bitter than usual. He took another packet and tore it open. He half waited for Greta to remind him of the threat of diabetes that ran in his family. She watched him pour the packet into his coffee, silent.
“Do we have to decide this now?” he asked.
“It needs to be in our divorce agreement.”
“Oh God, Greta. I don’t want this.” He put his head in his hands.
“What do you want, Phillip?”
“I want you. I want our family. I want . . .”
She glared at him. “At what point exactly, Phillip, did you decide to want me? Was it when you took her to bed the first time? The second time? Is it—” She stopped herself and looked down at the napkin that she had been twisting in her hands. After a moment she looked back at him with renewed composure. “I know now that you didn’t want any more children.” She waited a fraction for him to interrupt her before continuing. “It would have been nice of you to have let me know before all that . . .”
“Greta—”
“Did you ever even want Charlotte?” she asked.
It wasn’t the first time over the course of the year that she had asked him this. It was unclear to Phillip if she had forgotten his answer, or if she was checking for inconsistencies.
“I wanted you, Greta. I wanted Charlotte because you did, and now . . .”
“Now?” Greta leaned forward in her chair.
“Now I can’t imagine my life without her.” He looked into the painful depths of her eyes. “Or without you,” he added quietly.
She blinked at him. “So we get rid of them. Give them away to other . . . happy families. Or we give them to research.”
“I think if we had made another child, then I would be okay with the adoption option. Or maybe the stem-cell research?” He shuddered. “Research sounds so gruesome.”
“You would be okay with either of those options? Really?”
“I said if. If we had made another child, then yes. What I want is to go back and start over. To have a second child like we always planned to before . . .”
“It’s not going to happen.” Her voice was flat and dispassionate.
The cell phone that she had placed on the table lit up with a text. She picked up her phone and tapped out a lengthy reply while holding it in her lap. Phillip looked away to avoid watching her. A crowd of people was gathering near the counter, waiting for their drinks. Abruptly, he noticed Marina, the mother of one of Charlotte’s school friends. She was wearing faded cargo pants and a T-shirt with a swatch of blue that read PANTONE #292. He hadn’t seen her in months, and he felt a flash of embarrassment at the prospect of running into her now, of all times. She leaned on the counter, oblivious to him, lost in the Arts & Leisure section of a borrowed copy of the New York Times. Slowly Phillip turned toward the window, hoping to render himself unidentifiable without also alerting Greta, but at precisely that moment, Marina glanced up from the paper and her eyes met his. She squinted at him but didn’t move. He waved to her, and Greta turned around to see what had caught Phillip’s gaze. Marina hesitated slightly before approaching the table.
“Hi. How are you?” she asked Greta.
Greta smiled at her. Phillip recognized it as her polite smile reserved for strangers. She started to wave and then, noticing Marina’s outstretched hand, she reached out and shook her hand instead. “I’m Marina. Oliver’s mom. Charlotte’s friend?”
“Yes. Charlotte talks about Oliver all the time. I’m Greta. I know we’ve met but . . . nice to meet you again.”
Phillip drank the rest of his coffee and looked desperately into his empty cup, concentrating all of his energy on willing Marina to leave.
“Large Americano for Marina!” the goateed barista called out. “Marina!”
“That’s me,” Marina said, turning to leave. “Have a good weekend, you two.”
“Thank you,” Phillip said. As Marina walked away, he exhaled, only then realizing that he had been holding his breath during the women’s entire exchange.
Greta watched her retreat and then turned back to Phillip. “I keep forgetting her name.”
He nodded.
“Do you know her?”
“Charlotte and her son, Oliver, used to have playdates.”
Greta cocked her head slightly. “Used to? What, they don’t anymore?”
“Not for a few months,” Phillip said. “I thought maybe they went away for the summer.”
Greta raised her voice. “So you do know her.” She turned around to see if Marina was still there.
“Through her son. They played together . . .”
“You like redheads . . . never mind.” Greta picked up her cell phone and tossed it into her purse. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
; The following weekend Greta headed down the 405 South to pick up Charlotte, who was returning on the 7:55 p.m. flight from Seattle, at LAX. Greta sped down the freeway grateful for the steady flow of traffic. She turned the radio to a science show on NPR, trying to distract herself from thinking about Peter, whom she had left minutes earlier at his beach apartment.
He had just received an unexpected offer to play a small but pivotal role in a television movie that was shooting in Canada, and he had asked Greta to come with him. The part was of a janitor at a small women’s college who is the first victim to fall prey to a band of sorority werewolves. He was set to fly to Vancouver that Wednesday.
“I thought werewolves were men,” Greta said.
“The director has a feminist take on it,” Peter told her. “And he has a background in music video,” If he was aware of his non sequitur, he didn’t acknowledge it. He dropped to the floor and started doing push-ups.
Of course, Greta knew that he was an actor. She herself had watched Peter when Charlotte was in preschool. But in the months they had spent together, either by choice or design, the topic of the children’s show that he had been the long-standing host of rarely came up. Peter & Pooka had been one of Charlotte’s favorites and Greta had even bought the first three seasons of it on DVD, much preferring Peter’s voice to that of the whiny and fearful Caillou or the boundlessly enthusiastic Dora who seemed never to stop screaming. “SWIPER, NO SWIPING!” Peter’s voice was pleasant and relaxing, and unlike with the other frenetic animated shows, Greta found that she was able to sleep while Charlotte immersed herself in the universe of Peter & Pooka. Sleep. An act whose merits are wholly underappreciated except by victims of torture and by new parents.
It took at least a month of knowing the real Peter for Greta to stop inadvertently yawning whenever she heard his voice. She confessed this to him one night as they lay on their backs on sleeping bags in his empty apartment, thinking it would make him laugh. Instead, it had the opposite effect. The amiable humor that had attracted her since she had known him vanished. Helpless and embarrassed, she watched him as his face darkened. Almost immediately he apologized, but she refrained from discussing his acting career after that and was surprised when he sprang the Canadian movie on her.
When It Happens to You Page 17
