Eve, grateful, laughed. She wanted to ask how Simon was. She didn’t want to ask how he was. She didn’t know what to say at all.
“He spoke very fondly of you,” Izzy said.
Eve was even more confused. Izzy had come down without Ollie. She was planning to meet her old friend Amy the next day, who was to be her matron of honor. They were sitting at the kitchen table now—two women who knew each other even less well, it seemed, than they ever had.
Eve said, “I have some Armagnac. What do you say?”
“Oh yes, please,” Izzy said in her normal voice. “And some of those sugared almonds.”
Order, though, was far from restored.
“Hey,” Adrienne said. It was unusually cool for September and she was dressed for fall. It made her look older. “I hope I haven’t arrived too early. You usually work in the early morning, don’t you?” It was almost midday.
“Usually,” Jack said.
“I just headed straight out as soon as I finished at the studio.”
“Good,” Jack said. He opened a cupboard in the front hallway, took his hat from a shelf, and shrugged on a light jacket.
She looked at the hat and smiled.
Jack smiled, too, and patted its tattered brim fondly.
“Sort of an old friend,” he said.
“Well, a friend of Jackson Cooper’s is a friend of mine.”
He liked the way his name sounded in her voice. He was glad he’d called her. Glad she’d suggested coming out again. Glad she’d kept it informal, and slow. “Why don’t I come to you when I finish, lunchtime?” she’d suggested.
“Yes,” he’d said. “That would be fine.”
They walked awhile without speaking and then he said, “How’s the photography business?”
“Pretty good. This portrait I did was for Vanity Fair.”
Jack stopped walking, forcing her to quit and look back at him.
“That’s grown-up, kiddo.”
“I am grown-up, kiddo.”
“Are you?”
“I’m thirty-five. Divorced. I’m good with money, I own my own apartment. And I can say seven things in Swahili.”
Jack laughed. “I believe it all except the thirty-five part.”
“You would be wrong because I didn’t lie about that.”
He laughed again. “I’m genuinely surprised that you’re thirty-five. I had you down for late twenties.”
“Well, I guess being a writer doesn’t overcome being a man, does it? Men are always hopeless at women’s ages.”
Jack paused for a moment, thinking. “Last summer I went to a party over at Moby Harbor and spent the entire evening trying to impress a girl who turned out to be a teenager,” he said. “My wife despised me for it and I was appalled at myself. Two circumstances that seem to have become permanent.”
They were almost at Hatty’s. Neither had said that was where they were going, but now here they were.
“It’s the line between self-loathing and self-pity that you have to watch for,” she said.
Jack nodded. It was.
“Hey, it’s the pretty lady,” Hatty said.
“This is Adrienne, Hatty.”
“Pretty lady, pretty name. She’s got it aaaall goin’ on.” Hatty’s laughter vibrated, like rocks shaking in a barrel.
Jack and Adrienne laughed, too.
“Thirty-five is a good age,” Jack said when they’d sat down. “Although thirty-eight is even better. At thirty-eight you’re still young, but you’re beginning to get a real sense of yourself, if you’ve lived a little. Trouble is, thirty-eight wears off.”
“I don’t think about age, just what I’m doing. Work, mainly. I think about my work a lot.”
“That’s good,” Jack said. “Work is the lifeblood. Don’t buy into any of this horseshit about following your dreams and pissing time away wondering how you feel about everything. Do the work. You’re not gonna hit the moon with a bow and arrow.” He sounded preachy, even to himself. “Sorry,” he said. “My forty-ninth birthday just passed me at a dead run and I’m getting philosophical.”
“Forty-nine? I had you down for late twenties,” she said.
He laughed. “I guess it’s just…I don’t know, fifty. It’s a time for taking stock. And my inventory is looking dog-eared.”
“Six best-sellers and a play. Not so shabby from where I’m sitting.”
“I guess I’m looking at it from the two divorces and writer’s block angle.”
“Writer’s block. Is that a real thing?”
“No. It’s bullshit.”
Hatty brought their food, but Adrienne went on looking at him. She paused from picking a caper from her plate and asked, “Really?” genuinely wanting explanation, interested.
“It’s a useful term, but the block isn’t really psychological. Not for me anyway. It happens about here.” He indicated his left elbow with the fork in his right hand, then tapped his forehead. “The stuff that starts out up here, doesn’t make it past my elbow in the kind of condition I want it to. It’s not that I can’t write. It’s that I start expecting myself to put down my grand thoughts and have them look as penetrating and erudite on the page as they sounded in my head. I hit these points from time to time when I expect what I write not to need editing. That’s why, in my case anyway, it’s bullshit. Everything needs editing.”
“Everything.”
“Everything: biographies, closets, address books, friendships, fiction, life.”
She smiled at him and they ate for a while and then she put her fork down with finality, although her plate was still half full.
“How’d you know about the play?” he asked.
“I saw it. A long time ago, in a little theater in Newbridge. I liked it. I liked it very much, actually.”
“Hah. Imagine that.” There was a moment’s silence. He wanted to get off the subject. “I’m guessing I’m not going to be able to talk you into any pie?” he said.
She hadn’t come back to the house. They’d said good-bye at the car again. Standing next to it, she had not looked at him in that yearning way women did sometimes on parting. She was sure of herself, this woman. Calm and sure. Initiating their kiss good-bye, Jack had felt calm and sure himself.
Dear Eve,
This is a difficult letter to write. And I think, possibly, for you to read. There are so many things that I would like it to say, but I’m not sure that I will find the words. I hope that perhaps you will find them, hidden in mine.
I am writing to say I am sorry. There, that wasn’t so hard. And yet it has taken me more than twenty years. I have never said it. Not to you. I am saying it now. I know that I behaved appallingly at the end of our marriage, and I am shocked now when I think back to how young you were. Younger than Izzy is, and she seems to me, for all her self-assuredness and competence, not much more than a child.
I have not come to this acknowledgement lightly, as you will imagine. You were always intelligent and I suspect far more aware of most things than you were given credit for. I remember you, too, as good; thoroughly, fundamentally good. I will do my best to emulate your example from now on. I am fifty now. Too old to be foolish and too young not to make the best of the years left to me, and my family. I hope that Izzy will now become part of that family, and for that to happen successfully, I think you and I would need to establish at least a civil relationship and preferably an amicable one. I hope you can find it in your heart to consider this.
Kindest regards,
Simon
Mummy,
Here are the proofs for the invites. I think they look very smart. Would you like to stay at the hotel on the night? Ollie and I thought we might. Let me know and I’ll book your room when I book ours.
Izzy
Dear Eve,
Do women like to be cooked for? I have always suspected that they really prefer to dress up and eat fancy in public. You seem to be one of the more intelligent examples of the breed and I thought you might give me the
skinny.
Jack
Dear Marnie,
I am writing this because talking was never our strong suit. I am not sure now what was, but whatever it was, it’s lost. I have found during our brief separation that I am both less happy and more forward-looking than I thought I was. Or, at least, I am more aware of both of these states than I ever was during our marriage. Living with you was an in-the-moment experience and I think that is the sort of experience that suits you, Marnie, and maybe for a while it was a good thing for me, but that while is over. I feel calmer about this than I thought I would, if also regretful and apologetic. I imagine that from your point of view, living with me was often intolerable. I am difficult to the point of impossible at times, and of the things I might change about myself, I daresay that is not one. On this basis I suggest we make our split permanent. I am loath to involve lawyers, but if we must, we must.
Yours, with heart,
Jack
Beautiful Blonde Woman,
Come out Saturday. I’ll cook.
The Man with the Hat
Chapter Six
Simon Petworth signed his note to Laura with his initials and a roughly drawn heart, the way he always did. Then he lay a soft, cable-knit blanket over her and propped the note where she’d see it when she woke. With a finger to his lips, he shushed his sons. They were eight and ten and would not have been so easy to shush, except that their mother’s illness had become a heavy presence in the house. A presence they were acutely aware of. They were easily convinced to leave the room where she was dozing now on a Chesterfield sofa.
Ed, the older, quieter, more sensitive of the two, looked at his father. “Is she all right?” he said.
“She’s fine, a bit tired, that’s all.”
Simon laid his hand on the back of the boy’s warm, slender neck and looked at his sleeping wife, and he was filled with love. And momentarily, with fear of what they all might have lost. She had survived. The operation had gone extremely well and the doctors had assured him there was good reason to be hopeful. Laura herself was. But for him, Simon, the warning still rang. He would not take his family for granted ever again.
“Are you paying attention to any of this, Mummy?”
“Of course I am,” Eve said, aware of the lie. These calls from Izzy were constant now—always about the wedding. Always at a level of detail for which Eve could not quite develop the required, buzzing enthusiasm.
“You just seem so vague,” Izzy’s voice said.
Eve stirred. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be. I was just…Does Ollie cook?”
“Ollie? You’ve got to be kidding. No. He can make spag bol. It tastes all right, but I’ve banned him from making it now, because when he does, the kitchen looks like the scene of a massacre. He cooks like a man. You know, ketchup everywhere, uses every saucepan in the place.”
Eve did not think there were very many saucepans in Izzy’s flat, and anyway she was struck suddenly with how little she knew of the way men cooked. So many things that she thought of as “manly” were simply gleaned from novels or television or films. She remembered Tim Spence cooking for her once. Rather neatly, rather painfully self-consciously. Everything about her relationship with Tim Spence, a bachelor from the bridge club, had been painfully self-conscious. A circumstance which had been exacerbated by her mother’s lewd remarks whenever Eve had returned home from seeing him, on the dozen or so occasions when she had. The thing had been short-lived, stifled from the outset, and had ended as ineptly as it had begun, in discomfited near silence over dryish scones, in an over-decorated tearoom, on the river. More than once since, Eve had ducked into a doorway to avoid poor Tim. Poor Tim—she knew suddenly that this was the way a lot of people probably thought of her. Poor Eve.
“Mummy, Mummy…?”
“Yes, sorry.”
“Did you get the invitation proofs?”
“Yes, yes, I did.”
“And the sample menus?” Izzy’s voice was sharpening. She was afraid that her mother might skitter into, not levity, but that sort of light distractedness to which she was prone. Izzy was immensely irritated by light distractedness.
“Yes,” Eve said firmly, hoping to cut her off.
“Good. All right. See you next Saturday then.”
“Yes, Saturday.”
Eve discussed Simon’s letter with her therapist. She hadn’t intended to. It wasn’t as if the therapy was the type that focused on your past. At first, Eve had been glad of this, relieved not to have to relive the particularly throat-constricting lonelinesses of childhood. Although briefly, she had wondered whether that wasn’t what she needed. Briefly, in fact, she had wondered whether the whole thing wasn’t going to be a waste of time.
Beth, the therapist, hadn’t seemed, on first meeting, to embody the sorts of characteristics Eve was seeking—she’d expected someone neat and forthright who exuded the promise of a prescriptive, no-nonsense solution, but when Beth had called to her to come in after her initial knock, she had been greeted by a scruffy, flustered-looking woman whose soggy, once navy, cardigan drooped unhappily from her shoulders. But then Beth’s eyes had met hers, mindfully and intelligently. And from then on, she had always made Eve feel as few people had ever made her feel—as if she had her undivided interest.
Eve found herself, rather than dreading her therapy sessions, beginning to look forward to them. And the techniques that Beth had taught her for coping with her anxieties, anxieties which Beth seemed to accept, reassuringly, as important, but nevertheless unremarkable, really were effective. Eve had gone into that shop, for instance, the little boutique that sold women’s clothes, having only ever glanced admiringly at the window before. She’d always felt that, in a shop like that—a small, exclusive shop—a woman would have to know what she wanted, be confident in her selection. Be the sort of woman that Eve was not. But one afternoon recently, almost unthinking, she had walked in; and bought something, too—a lovely linen dress, light gray with white piping at the neck and pockets. She had left, with the dress tucked inside a pink and black carrier that advertised her visit, feeling almost euphoric.
But Simon’s letter had set her back. Reading it, she had felt, not the symptoms that she had come to recognize of the actual attacks, but the disconsolate sense of loss again. Loss of love, loss of a past she could have had, and also, now, the potential loss of Izzy. Simon’s house, Simon’s family, Simon’s wife—would all be more exciting than anything she, Eve, had to offer. Izzy, and Ollie, too, would want to spend Christmases there, Sunday lunches. Eve imagined lively meals in a charming dining room. Lots of happy talk and laughter and people. But not her. Not Eve.
Simon was asking for her forgiveness and sanction, but he didn’t want her. No more than he ever had. Or anyone ever had. She tried to quell this self-pitying voice, but it was a struggle, and that was why, when Beth had turned to her today and asked, “So, how are things, Eve?” in that marvelously intent way she had, she had begun to cry. Not the way she had cried that night with Gwen, not uncontrollably, but more a slow, accepting kind of weeping. Mourning.
Eve wrote that she thought that women did like to be cooked for. But that saucepan usage was an issue. Jack laughed. He had heard from Dex that day, too—a note on the back of a card from the studio:
Thinking about you. Specifically, that thing you do to the nuts. If you ever figure out how to do that to a woman, let me know.
“All good, chief?” Rick asked. He was unpacking orange juice and newspapers and coffee in the kitchen.
“All good,” Jack said, still grinning. Then, leafing through a vegetarian cookbook he’d bought the day before, thinking about Adrienne’s arrival and drinking from the cup Rick had handed him, he kept grinning. “All good,” he repeated.
“I want to assure you that I replaced the chicken stock with vegetable,” he told Adrienne later. “I was tempted, I’ll admit. But I stuck by your principles. Anyway, I don’t think it hurts the flavor too much.”
“
No,” she said. She took another mouthful and ate it before she said, “I wanted to be a writer all through college.”
Jack lowered his fork. Just when we were out of the woods, he thought. He waited for the description of the stories she had written as a girl, the pieces she’d had published in the high school magazine, her ideas for a novel, the manuscript that she was going to finish just as soon as she had time.
“But I tried and realized I had no talent for it,” she went on. “The idea part is easy enough, but the execution is hell. I’ve had an enormous admiration for writers ever since.”
He had misjudged her again. He had to stop doing that. She was wonderful. He stood and rounded the table and lifted her by the shoulders out of her chair and kissed her neck and then her smooth, unpainted lips.
“Let’s make that writer singular,” he said.
If you could make love to a waterfall, it would feel like Adrienne. Clean and bright and pure and moving quickly, but steadily. Like something you couldn’t stop or hold; something fluid. Unlike Lisa, Jack thought, lying next to Adrienne, who was sleeping, lightly and silently as he had known she would, beside him. What would Lisa have been? Taffy? He closed his eyes briefly, dislodging the image. He could get himself on these metaphor toots for hours. They had sustained him through many a dinner party, and got him started writing some mornings when the words came heavy and stiff. Although lately, even this trick had failed him.
He shook this thought off and got up, quietly thanking God that nothing else had. No repeat of The Lisa Problem, which was how he would henceforth think of it. He went into the bathroom and drank some water and thanked God again, out loud, just to seal the deal, then he went back into the bedroom and watched Adrienne sleep. Her skin was like one of those statues you saw in fountains in Europe, pale and cool.
That Part Was True Page 8
