“I’m learning,” he said.
“What bit did you want to talk about?”
“Like I say, I’m learning.”
She laughed. “You’re good at flirting, aren’t you?”
“I had three big sisters and a slew of aunts so I mastered that stuff in kindergarten. It’s the talking to women I never got good at. I always got what I wanted from them without it, I guess.” He grinned broadly at her then, in part to mask this confidential tone.
“And now? Are you getting what you want now?”
He pulled her to him. She leaned in, in a lithe embrace.
“Seem to be,” he said.
He served the corn first and watched as she lifted her own contribution to the meal with a circumspect hand and then ran a knife, precisely, along two rows of kernels so that they fell in a pile on her plate. She put the ear down and proceeded to eat the kernels individually, cautiously, as if they were something she was tasting for the first time.
“I’ve been invited to a gallery opening on Wednesday. I wondered if you’d like to come into the city for it,” she said.
Jack had lifted his own corn and was about to bite it. There was butter on his fingers. He wanted to say no, but a psychological palm raised itself in his brain. Stop, it warned. He liked this woman; what would it cost to make her happy?
“Why not?” he said. “Want some butter for that?” He pushed the dish toward her, but she declined.
“Actually,” she said, “I say that I’m a vegetarian, but in fact I’m considering giving up all animal-based products.”
“I don’t think I could do that,” he said slowly. There was no challenge in his voice. Adrienne did not incite challenge in him. “I don’t think I could limit my food choices, even if I can, intellectually anyway, accept the concept.”
“No,” she said. “I haven’t asked you to.” Her voice, though not adversarial, had assumed a sort of quiet moral high ground.
Jack laughed. “Baby,” he said. “You bring out the good guy in me, you really do. But I’m a red meat kinda guy.”
He was relieved when she smiled.
The gallery opening was star-studded; the artist was connected and on the rise. Adrienne had taken the portrait of him that graced the catalog. From Jack’s point of view, this was the most interesting part of the evening. He found the work derivative and the crowd uninteresting. But Adrienne seemed to be enjoying herself and he put on his best face for her sake. She looked stunning in a simple green dress that highlighted the length of her neck and the translucence of her skin. He had not been surprised when the other photographers, standing in a small pack on the pavement, had taken her picture on the way in.
Eve, peering at her computer screen, thought Adrienne—Adrienne Charles, the caption said—looked like a willow, a willow in spring. Jack looked exactly the way that he looked on his book covers: relaxed, tanned, good-looking, and masculine. Very masculine.
I went to a shindig in New York this week, he wrote:
Arty kind of crowd. We had dinner with a few of them afterward. They all talked a big story about the food (“Japanese fusion,” what the heck?). I’d bet hard cash that none of ’em would know which end of a whisk was up. Are you still mulling over party ideas?
No, she wasn’t.
She was, however, considering the fact that her friendship with Jack was really much emptier than she had convinced herself that it was. Something had been altered by that photograph, that real-time image of him with his hand laid, so evocatively, on the arm of a beautiful young woman. It had been replaced by something she was more familiar with, the feeling that she was in the shadows while somebody else shone.
I have no particular love of city life these days, Jack wrote:
but I have been reminded these past weeks what it is to eat in one. What it is to be able to pick up a telephone and have somebody arrive at your door, minutes later, carrying a container of fresh clam chowder. What it is to have anything you want served to you at any time. It is heaven. Well, for me at least, but I think maybe you share some of my notions of paradise. In my mind you are sometimes rounded, but sometimes a slight woman. Your cooking has a delicacy that I associate with slightness; nevertheless your descriptions of food are infused with the kind of love that suggests an eater. Are you an eater, Eve, or do you put beautiful things on beautiful dishes and set them before your friends and family as offerings? Testaments of your love.
J
Eve did not answer this message. Five days later she received this one:
Erase that last lot of hogwash. I don’t mean to pry. I’m just getting pompous. I will be fifty in what seems like a very few months. I guess pompous goes with the territory.
If Jack’s visits to the city were buoyed by his delight in visiting restaurants, they were marred slightly by Adrienne’s lack of enjoyment in this same pastime. He had taken her to Lucio’s, where she had laid the menu down after the briefest peruse before ordering a salad and a mineral water. The waiter, who had described the evening’s offerings to them with religious gravity, had repeated Adrienne’s order back to her, blank-faced, before turning to Jack with an expression which seemed, with the subtlest of brow movement, to say, “Well, sir, I tried.”
After that, Jack had taken to going out for lavish lunches alone, while Adrienne was at her studio. Then in the evening they would go together, somewhere local, where he would order modestly while she talked about her day, or he would fix himself something simple in her tiny kitchen, which was as clinically immaculate and ostentatiously equipped as the kitchen of every noncook.
They had fallen into a routine where he visited her for two nights during the week and she came to his house on the weekends. It had been, so far, uncomplicated. An undemanding wander along a wide promenade.
One night, walking back to her apartment with a supply of groceries selected by Jack, Adrienne said, “I’m not sure that photography is an art.”
“Sure it is,” Jack replied. But her expression, in profile, was serious. “Anything is an art if you do it right,” he confirmed.
“I like the idea of that, Jack. But I don’t know that it’s true. Maybe we’re just talking semantics. Maybe it’s just that we need better words, better definitions for words, but there are some things that have soul in them, and some that do not. There are some things that require a kind of gut response. I don’t have that. My approach is quite scientific.”
She had delivered this in her usual measured way without breaking the uniform stride he had become accustomed to, walking beside her, but he sensed, nevertheless, some feeling. A depth of feeling, he realized, that he had not felt from her before.
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I haven’t got it either.”
“Yes, you have.”
“Nope, I think I’ve been looking for it lately, but soul has definitely eluded me.”
“Possibly, lately,” she agreed. She slowed a little then and went on, “I haven’t said, because I know I shouldn’t, but I noticed that you haven’t been working at all. I hope I wasn’t the distraction. I don’t want to distract you, Jack.”
They had reached Adrienne’s building and paused there, beneath the three narrow steps that separated the front door and cramped lobby area from the street.
“You don’t distract me, Adrienne. You…” What, he thought, what was it that he got from Adrienne? “You steady me. You’re like a nice long patch of smooth sea.”
She smiled dispassionately. “That’s nice,” she said. “But I saw that play you wrote, Jack. You’re an artist. And I know it’s a sensitive area, but I hope you might do something like that again.”
“Sure,” he said, conscious of a sense of wanting to escape—a feeling he had had many times in his life, but not these past few weeks with Adrienne. From habit he turned his voice jokey, his first defense with women. “Sure,” he said. “Only I’d like to get in some practice lashing myself to the mast before I head into the swells again.”
Sh
e smiled, but she did not laugh.
Ollie’s laugh was too loud. He was drunk, or getting drunk, Eve thought with dismay. She had already had two champagne cocktails herself, both consumed too quickly, her hands clutching the glass stems so tightly that she was in danger of snapping one. She must not worry. She must not. “Two eggs,” she recited softly. “Four ounces of butter.” In the absence of a ticking clock, Beth had suggested that concentrating on a familiar recipe might help her to compose herself. Six ounces of sugar… Eve thought. But then two things had happened. Ollie laughed and Simon Petworth appeared in the doorway. Izzy’s engagement party was beginning to warm up. Of these events, the former had the greater danger in it.
Simon’s arrival was not an ambush. He and Izzy, with Eve’s consent, had choreographed it. Izzy had wanted Simon at her party, and Eve had understood that Izzy would like to have both of her parents there, though she found it uncomfortable to think of herself and Simon that way—as a single entity. She had succeeded so well in separating herself from him, and their short marriage, in the years that had intervened since his departure. And now, this new Simon, with his flesh-and-blood concerns, seemed different to her anyway from the charismatic, yet detached, man that she remembered—the man who had always seemed distinct from her, if she were honest, even before he had left her. When she thought of them together, as a married couple, she saw herself as a silly young woman, so much less sure than Izzy was, a young woman who’d been desperate for something, someone, stronger to hold on to.
It occurred to her now that Ollie might be doing this same thing with Izzy. It was an unpleasant thought, but surprisingly, it calmed her. Her own fluttery concerns were washed away with new, more powerful ones for her daughter. She looked back at Ollie, who was still grinning too broadly, grabbing hands and pumping them with too much fervor, kissing too many pretty girls in pretty dresses too heavily. She was watching him so intently that she took her eyes off her ex-husband’s entrance and presently he was at her side.
“Hello, Eve,” he said. His voice had not changed. Of course it hadn’t. Why had she imagined that it would have? Nothing about his physical self had changed. The reshaping of him had been wrought at a more elemental level.
“I won’t stay long,” he said. Reassuring her, she supposed, that he would stand by their agreement, their compromise for her benefit, that he would arrive a little late and leave early, so as not to hijack the party—his own expression. He would come alone, he had suggested to Izzy, so as not to upset her mother, and avoid “hijacking the party.” Her friends, he had explained sensibly, might be curious about a father arriving so late on the scene, and that was not the point of the gathering. He was paying for it, of course, with the same open-palmed generosity that he was showing toward the wedding arrangements. He had offered to meet with Eve privately earlier, but she had declined.
“Hello, Simon,” she said at last. They looked at each other for a moment, each immersed briefly in the past, but with different pictures in their minds. Each slightly apologetic, imagining more fault on their own part than there probably had been. Each allowing less blame to sheer weight of circumstance than was actually appropriate.
“Eve, I—” he began.
“Izzy has spotted you,” Eve cut in brightly—as if she were speaking to one of the toddlers who came into the shop.
Izzy approached them warily, not knowing how to behave when seeing her parents together. Eve was flooded with feeling for her. It was hardly surprising her daughter was such a crisp thing. She was brittle. Not hard, like Virginia had been, as, to her shame now, Eve had once thought. This evening, particularly, she looked strained. She had a wonderful new dress, a flattering sheath of rose pink, but she seemed frail in it. Her eyes were faintly shadowed beneath her makeup. She glanced from one parent to another, and Simon, seeming to catch her nervousness, too, smiled paternally at her and said, “You look very beautiful, my dear. Are you enjoying your party?”
This last inquiry, Eve noted, suggested concern. She was pleased. Perhaps Simon’s presence would be a positive one. Perhaps, after all, rather than taking something from her, he would add something. She had done a poor job of raising Izzy; she could see that now. Maybe if Simon had indeed developed some sense of his duties toward her, he would be, not a threat, but an ally.
When Izzy smiled, it looked forced. “Oh, yes, it’s wonderful. Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. And you, too, Mummy. Thanks for everything.”
Eve and Simon smiled at her together. Two corners of a triangle.
Then Ollie joined them. “Hello, sir,” he said.
Both Eve and Izzy looked at Ollie nervously, but he seemed to sober under Simon’s gaze.
“Nice to see you again,” he said squarely, straightening himself and extending a firm hand, which Simon shook.
“Good evening, Ollie.” They had been introduced over drinks the previous week.
Ollie, still directing himself to Simon, took Eve’s arm then, and said, “I’m just going to borrow my mother-in-law-to-be, if you don’t mind. I’d like her to meet some of my friends.”
Eve wondered if they had planned this, too, mapped her exit for her, and discovered she didn’t mind if they had.
Simon, smiling assent, said, “I’m so glad to have seen you, Eve,” as Ollie turned, leading her away.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, and I you.” She felt as if she had slain a dragon.
Ollie, steering Eve into the nearest small knot of young people, introduced her to each of them. They were people that he worked with, peripheral, tidily polite, and slightly awkwardly presented. In other parts of the room older, more familiar friends, the longer-term crowd from school and childhood and early London days, were relaxed and laughing, planning by now where they’d go on to afterward.
Eve greeted everybody, and then, in the empty half-beat that followed, Ollie took another drink from a passing tray and finished it quickly. His grip on Eve’s elbow as he led her off again tightened, and then, all of a sudden, as if his strings had been cut, he let go and set his whole weight against an art deco console standing between the twin arches that led through to the bar from the main reception room. The large vase of flowers it supported teetered.
“Shit,” he said. Then, recovering himself, “Sorry, Mrs. P. Bit tight.”
Eve looked at him levelly. “Yes,” she said. “You are.”
“I know, sorry…” He put his hand to his mouth as if to take the expletive back and adopted the expression of an impish eleven-year-old.
“Not much shocks me, Ollie,” Eve said. “Certainly not language. I grew up tugging at the petticoats of a woman who had a vocabulary to rival a dockworker’s. But I am worried about you and Izzy tonight. You both seem…on edge.”
He repeated the loud laugh. “Yeah, we’re On Edge,” Ollie said. It was the first time he’d ever spoken rudely to Eve. They were both aware of it.
“Sorry, Mrs. P.,” he said, sounding like himself again. “It’s this wedding stuff.”
He looked so young in his smart suit. Strange how dressing older always made people look younger, Eve thought. “I know,” she said gently. “I know.”
At the end of the evening, Eve kissed Izzy a light, but sympathetic good night and told her to get some sleep. Simon had already left. She had watched his retreating back with a surprising lack of feeling—a strangely exhilarating lack of feeling. She took the hotel elevator to the room that Izzy had booked for her and sat on the edge of the big bed, on which the covers had been expertly turned back, and looked at herself in the long mirror on the dressing table opposite. She was exhausted, but she had done it. She had traveled to London and got through the entire party. She had met Simon. She had stood by her daughter’s side just like any ordinary mother might. She slid off her shoes and rubbed her feet. They were aching, but she felt, anyway, like dancing.
Chapter Eight
“Would you not do that, honey?”
“I’m sorry, not do what?”
&n
bsp; “Not break the bread into those teeny-tiny liddle mouse turd things.”
Adrienne looked at her hands, as if they had a life separate from the rest of her, and paused from rolling small pieces of bread into balls and dropping them onto her side plate.
“This bothers you?” she said, turning her palm over so that one of the little balls was displayed there, like something fragile and precious—a pearl.
“Yep. It does. It bothers me.”
“It’s just a habit, I guess. I always do it.”
“I know you do.”
“And it bothers you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But you’ve never said anything before.”
“I guess maybe we’ve only just reached the ‘It bothers me that you like to turn bread into mouse turds’ stage.”
“I don’t think this is about bread, Jack.”
“Believe me, it’s about bread.”
“I really don’t think it is, Jack.”
Jack looked over his shoulder, hoping, although for reasons other than hunger, that the waiter would arrive with his stuffed zucchini. There was no sign of him. They were eating at a small, brightly lit place with a tile floor. It was called The Glass House—Adrienne’s choice. The zucchini had looked to Jack like the only thing you could eat without instigating some sort of revolution in your gut. He had said something along these lines to Adrienne, but she had continued to gaze seriously at the menu in response, running a tranquil finger down the italicized lettering.
When the waiter had come—too friendly, like a lay preacher, hovering in his black T-shirt with half a day’s stubble on his face—he and Adrienne had entered into a five-minute, intense discussion and then she had ordered a green salad as she almost always did.
“That’s it?” Jack said, incredulous, as the waiter removed their menus, floridly snapped them closed, and left, looking, Jack thought, ridiculously self-satisfied for a guy who was hustling lima beans for a living.
That Part Was True Page 10
