“I had an eating disorder for a while,” Lisa announced in response. “But I found this great therapist. Cured me like that.” It was a joke, but the delivery, ill-timed and lacking backbone, crippled it. She clicked her fingers, and in the silence that the remark had engendered, the sound carried.
Dex, saving her, laughed. And Lisa, bestowing on him in return a weak, grateful smile, lifted her glass and took another earnest step toward complete intoxication.
At some point after the discussion about the Kingston School and Dex’s second too-long Hollywood anecdote, at which Lisa grinned uncomfortably, while Adrienne toyed impassively with her water tumbler, Jack felt his mood dulling. He had done very little work since Marnie had left and he had drunk too much—never a good combination for him. But it was several hours afterward that the nadir came.
When the coffee was finished, they walked back along the beach to the house, Adrienne carrying her tan leather sandals by their straps, dangling them from her long fingers.
Lisa—her tendency to chatter extinguished finally by alcohol, Jack’s casually pally manner toward her, and the taunting inner voices that plagued her thirty-eight-year-old, single status—grew mute and fell behind. And Jack, noticing, conscious of a growing thud in his left temple and a groggy sensation of afternoon hangover regret and hopelessness, was struck by the sadness in the downward line of her small jaw. He reached to pull her back into the group and let his arm lie across her shoulders, affectionately, lazily, for long enough to reignite her.
By the time they reached the wooden steps that rose from the sand to the back of Jack’s garden, his desire to climb them alone was close to overwhelming, but Lisa, spurred by refreshed optimism, tripped swiftly up ahead of him, her pert little rear—an apricot in stretch Capri pants—almost at his nose as she ascended the steep first part of the flight. And then Dex stood back to let Adrienne pass, too. Jack resigned himself to the rest of the evening. He had lost all interest in it.
Adrienne, at the house, made leaving noises, but Dex, discouraging, pulled a chair back for her on the deck, where they’d been when she arrived. It was after five by then, and Jack, seeking comfort and solitude, retreated to the one place he knew he could always find it, the kitchen.
“You need something, chief?” Rick asked.
“No, Rick. It’s fine. Why don’t you take off for the day?”
Rick looked at his boss, suspicious. But he looked at Jack that way a lot, so Jack ignored it.
“Take the rest of that ham, if you think Christa could use it.”
They both knew that Christa could use it. Rick’s wife was feeding her own family and about half a dozen others as far as Jack could tell—cousins, friends, a constant influx of relatives looking for work in America.
“Okay, chief,” Rick said. He removed the white jacket he always wore at Jack’s house and hung it on a hanger on a hook inside the door of a large walk-in cupboard. Then he took the ham out of the refrigerator and wrapped it.
“Don’t forget the girls are coming to clean tomorrow morning,” he said.
“No,” Jack said. It was the sort of thing he always forgot immediately.
Jack wanted to sober up. And he figured Dex and Lisa could do with it, too. He could hear them laughing outside and he knew Dex had opened another bottle of wine. Adrienne was the only one still in full possession of her faculties. She was not a person, Jack thought, whom it was easy to imagine in any other state.
He took two long loaves from a basket, and lay them on a chopping board and turned the oven on. He had some provolone; he’d make crostini now to sop up the booze, and then later ratatouille. Adrienne could eat that, if she stayed.
“My father buys all your books,” she said then from the doorway, where she’d appeared silently, like a shadow.
Jack had begun slicing the bread. Inwardly he sighed. Outwardly he smiled.
“He loves them,” Adrienne went on.
“Thank him for me,” Jack replied, waiting for the request of a signed copy.
“Will you keep writing the same sorts of things?”
It was an innocent enough question—the wrong question, but the sort of thing that people did ask all the time. Jack had fielded worse, and from less genial people than Adrienne. But it wasn’t a good day. It hadn’t been a good few weeks.
“No,” he said deliberately. “I’m gonna write some fancy, literary stuff that all those critics in New York who hate me are gonna need their thesauruses to review.” His expression hadn’t altered, but there was no mistaking the vehemence of his tone.
Adrienne straightened herself from the doorjamb. “I meant—” she began slowly, choosing her words.
Jack put his knife down and interrupted her. “I know what you meant. You meant: Now that I’ve made my millions, why don’t I write something worth a shit?”
“No—” she said, still thinking.
“Yes,” he interrupted again. “Yes, you meant why don’t I write something that proves that I can write. Something to demonstrate that I am not simply a third-rate hack who got lucky pandering to the tastes of bored husbands on vacation and illiterate morons who can’t pronounce ‘Proust.’”
Adrienne looked at him steadily. “My father belongs in neither of those categories,” she said.
The reasonableness of this response did nothing to mollify Jack. “Listen,” he said, openly angry now, allowing himself the headlong dive into raw aggression that always felt so blazingly justified in the moment. “I don’t need secondhand compliments—‘My father likes your books. My granny likes your books.’ I get them all the time from people who need to put some distance between the sort of stuff I write and the sort of stuff they keep on their nightstands to remind themselves that they could quote four lines of Eliot in college.” He took up the knife and began slicing again. The taut metallic seesaw of the blade against the board echoed the set of his features.
Adrienne, silent, watched.
Lisa, who at some point had materialized behind her, watched silently, too, but only for a moment. She shouldered past Adrienne, crossed the kitchen quickly, and ran two protective arms around Jack’s waist from behind. She had heard enough of the conversation to gather its theme if not its specifics. “Jack’s a great writer,” she said.
Jack, flinging the knife down so that it landed quivering, spun to face Lisa and wrenched her hands away roughly. “Lisa, will you please just lay off,” he yelled.
Lisa was drunk, but not that drunk. She turned and walked straight out of the kitchen door without looking back.
Adrienne watched Jack for a moment longer and then, wordless, too, went to collect her things and say good-bye to Dex. After she’d gone, when Dex came looking for him, Jack lifted the knife, but not his eyes, in his direction, a warning. Dex heeded it.
A courier came to the door and Gwen answered.
“Couldn’t tell me where Marsh Farm is, could you, love?” he asked as she signed for the package he handed her.
Gwen could, and did. And then, when the van had turned on the gravel and left the lane as silent as it usually was again, she went into the library and handed Eve the package.
Eve, seeing the parcel, wondered, hoped a little, that it might be something from Jack Cooper. Of course it wasn’t. She admonished herself as she removed from it, after Gwen had gone to finish her ironing, a black ring binder labeled “Wedding” and a note from Izzy.
“You’ll see I’ve highlighted the things that are on your list,” Izzy had written. “Mostly telephone calls, e-mails, checking on prices and availability, that sort of thing.” Her tone implied—simple things, things that Eve could manage, as opposed to other, more important things that she could not.
Eve flipped through the binder, noting the highlighted items. She could manage them, but the bigger picture was clearing for her for the first time since Izzy and Ollie had told her about their impending marriage. The wedding. Eve felt alarm begin to fizz in the pit of her stomach. A wedding, a big wedding, kno
wing Izzy. People and parties—all the things that Eve had spent the last few years avoiding, and some years even before that if she was honest. The sorts of things that Virginia had done. And, even Eve could admit, done well. So much better than she ever could.
“Stress is for unemployed folks and victims of repression and racism. And pussies,” Jack said. “Healthy, white, middle-class American men have no right to it.”
Jim laughed and looked across his desk at Jack, whom he’d been treating for minor ailments for twenty years.
“Well, something’s going on,” he said. “Your blood pressure’s higher than I’ve ever known it, and the rash might be viral, or some sort of contact dermatitis, maybe an allergy, but these things tend to be exacerbated by stress.”
Jack had finished buttoning his shirt. The rash, a small flare of scarlet dots on his chest, had subsided considerably before he’d shown it to Jim, casually, in the course of a routine checkup. But he had mentioned it anyway because he was accustomed to having the sort of hale, muscular, regularly handsome and reliable sort of body that rarely betrays or surprises a person, even so slightly.
Jim finished writing a prescription for mild hydrocortisone and handed it to him. “Take a vacation maybe. Go fishing,” he said.
Jack laughed. Fishing was Jim’s prescription for most things. Oftentimes it worked.
Jack walked home feeling better. There’d been no mention of the strain of the previous afternoon. The night before, he’d finished making the crostini and he and Dex had eaten it in close to silence, and then, later, he’d served the ratatouille with Rioja. They’d listened to Duke Ellington. They’d gone to bed early.
Dex had slept late. And, Jack had noted, finding him in the kitchen when he came out of his study, the sleep had done him good. Dex was eight years younger than Jack. One night’s sleep dissolved the years. Jack figured he had reached the point where it took at least three.
At his car, tossing a bag in the trunk, Dex had said, “Tell me to break a leg.”
“Break a leg,” Jack had echoed rotely.
Dex got into the car and said through the open window, “Got a callback for something good.” He turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear.
Jack, watching his face, saw that intent purposefulness again. “Break a leg,” he said, this time sincerely. He had slapped the car roof and, in the hollow of the reverberation, felt foolish.
But now, walking back, it was all easing in him a bit. Maybe Jim was right and he had been stressed. What the hell, these things happened to middle-aged men. He just needed to get quiet again. Get back to work. Get in a routine. It wasn’t like he really missed Marnie.
Jack adjusted his hat, a beaten-up Panama to which he was extremely attached, against the gathering summer heat and thought about his seven-year marriage to Marnie. He couldn’t believe it had lasted seven years. From the get-go it had been halfhearted on his part, and probably hers, too, he thought now, the way things had turned out. Although he still couldn’t believe he’d been so naïve about the Carla thing. It would never have occurred to him that Marnie was schtupping—or whatever the correct term was for lesbians—a vacationing librarian from Wisconsin. Much less that she’d leave him for her. Marnie’s little passions had always seemed so lightweight: the pottery, the herb growing, the children’s book—cute, but lightweight.
He had slipped, he realized, in those last months with Marnie—or years, maybe—into an unattractive, but addictive, state of assumed superiority.
He thought then, as he always did when he was searching for the better parts of himself, of his father, who had watched him saunter up to a sprint starting line once, aged fourteen, overly confident of the field, and seen him soundly beaten by a hitherto unnoticed, scrawny twelve-year-old. Afterward he’d chided Jack for sulking.
“Son,” he’d said. “There’s talent everywhere. But you can’t tell it from the surface of things and nothing will blind you to the possibility of it like cockiness.”
Jack had almost protested this, but his father’s expression had silenced him.
“So, next time you’re feeling superior, Jack, lie down until it passes.”
Jack liked to say that he had never forgotten that, never forgotten the kind, wise look on his father’s face when he’d said those words. But he had, he thought, he had.
For a while there, a nice, unchallenging little wife had suited him. He was Jackson Cooper, successful writer, good cook, and all-round terrific guy. Wasn’t that right? Everybody said so.
Jack shook his head at himself and sent a small prayer of apology to his father and a vow to do better, and then, lifted, he went into the new French Market.
Inside the place was, as he’d suspected it would be, artfully quaint, but to its credit, the smell of cheese was evident and, near the back, of bread. He passed the rows of stuff designed for display rather than eating—oddly shaped bottles of fancy vinegar, jars full of bloated fruit, like pickled body parts, and incongruously colored pasta—and found a bottle of soy sauce and a jar of Dijon mustard and took them to the counter, where he paid a young man with a sharp haircut.
“How are you, Mr. Cooper?” the young man asked, handing Jack his purchases in a refined brown bag.
Jack, lost in the cloud of his thoughts still, must have looked vague when he said, “Fine. Just Fine, thanks.”
The young man laughed.
“I’m Josh,” he said. “Josh Hapwell. I cut your grass for three summers.”
Jack looked at the young man steadily while pocketing his change. “You that little runt of a kid?”
The young man laughed again. Jack figured him for early twenties.
“Yep. I’m the manager here now.”
Jack smiled. “That right?” He remembered Josh, helping his father out in the garden. He’d been a thin boy and timid for his age. The dad had moved on at some point and Jack hadn’t seen much of Josh after that.
“Yes, sir,” Josh said. “So if there’s anything I can do for you, just let me know.”
“There is one thing you can do for me, Josh.”
Josh looked across the counter at him, attentive.
“Don’t ever call me ‘sir’ again.”
Back at the house, Jack took a cold beer from the supply of two that Rick always left cooling for him on summer afternoons and fixed himself some tuna and boiled eggs. He ate on the deck and read awhile and then he wrote to Eve:
Never wash blueberries before you store them. They deteriorate too quickly if you do. And buy them blue. Blue like that blue you see beneath the dark on summer nights—inky blue.
Then he laid the pen down and thought about her; tried to picture her.
Fair, he thought, fair and fifty-five. Slim and unremarkable. The women who read his books were fair and fifty-five, slim and unremarkable. They picked them up after their husbands had discarded them and then surprised themselves by quite liking them. Although, he thought, Eve’s praise had had a different quality. Not grudging. There was no “Not bad” in that first letter of hers. And the way she wrote about food. There was something in that that spoke to something in him.
“Jack,” he signed, feeling for the first time in weeks…soothed, balanced again. He needed to apologize to Lisa, and he would. He felt bad about the whole business. But he’d pick his moment, so that she didn’t take it for an opening. He wanted to be straight with her—decent and straight. He went to get his second beer and took it up to the study with him. He’d look over what he’d done that morning, call his agent. Answer some e-mails. He’d get a hold of himself.
“Hello?” Jack lifted his watch from the bedside table and looked at it as he switched on the lamp—3:00 a.m. “Marnie?” he said.
“Jack, I…”
“Marnie, it’s three a.m.”
“I’m sorry, Jack, I wasn’t thinking. I’m not thinking straight.” She was crying. The sound, bouncing off satellites, streaming through wires, crossing state lines, echoed accusingly in his ear. He swun
g his legs out over the edge of the bed and sighed. “What’s up, hon?”
There was a beat, a pause for regrouping on her end. Then, “We were always friends, Jack.”
“Were we?” he asked, too wearily. Too sincerely.
Marnie, making the switch from tears to acidity with an abruptness that no man is ever prepared for, particularly at 3:00 a.m., came back hard and fast. “Well, I tried to be your friend, Jack. It was you who shut me out, not the other way around.”
Jack sighed again. “Marnie, I’m not sure what it is you want from me right now.”
There was a pause. Marnie was apparently not sure of this either. Between them, the satellites and the wires remained open, alive and expectant.
“Listen, Marnie. I think maybe you oughtta talk to someone; you know a shrink or something. I can’t advise you. I really can’t.”
“That’s rich.”
Damn, he’d walked into it. There’d be no stopping her.
“You’re the one who needs a shrink, Jack. I might be a bit unglued at the moment, but at least I’m in touch with my emotions. I know that I have some problems, I can admit that. You’re the one who’s keeping it all inside, who doesn’t know what he wants, and can’t talk about it. Maybe if you could have talked—opened up to me—we wouldn’t be in this mess, Jack. Have you considered that? Has it ever occurred to you that this might be in some way your fault, too? Have you taken any responsibility at all for the breakdown of our marriage, Jack? Because I am not prepared to take all the blame. I was the one who left, yes, but you drove me to it, Jack. I had no choice.” Her voice cracked then and she began to sob.
Jack waited. Then he said, “Honey, it’s okay. You’re tired, though. You need some sleep. I’ll call you in a few days. Just try to get a little sleep…okay?”
That Part Was True Page 3
