by Toby Devens
And I would have. But I caught a snatch of conversation from inside Kelley Hall. The words were muffled through the closed door, but when you’ve heard someone tell you he loves you, he adores you, you’re the best thing that ever happened to him, sorry but good-bye, you remember that voice forever.
So fine, I’d see him. Now or never. I’d gripped the door handle, ready to push, when a student, some kid in an Orioles baseball cap and a camouflage backpack, came up behind me. “May I help you with that, ma’am?” Polite enough to charm an old lady, which he obviously thought I was. Oy! and its Korean equivalent, Aigoo! I almost turned on my heel then, but the kid was holding the door, waiting. I took a deep breath and barreled through. Charlie was already striding to the lectern, his back to me. My intent was to slip into a seat in the last row, but it was packed, so I wound up in the only empty seat, second row, dead center. It took me a while, concentrating on my hands, which I’d folded into the prayer pose to control their tremor, before I felt I could look up. When I did, my glance met Charlie’s and locked. Brown eyes to blue, we held that stare for maybe five seconds. Then I blinked. First, dammit. But he managed to knock into his stack of notes and send them flying. So I called it a draw.
• • •
Charlie had always been an accomplished public speaker. He was quick on his feet and, more important, he had nerves of steel and the confidence of a man born to an established trust fund.
That afternoon at Goucher, once I heard all I ever needed to know about the electoral college, I tuned out and treated myself to nearly an hour of just watching him, with that voice, its timbre as mellow as a Guarneri cello’s, playing soothingly in the background.
Maybe I wasn’t objective—we had a complicated history—but to me Charles Evans Pruitt was still handsome, even with the extra weight, which in his well-cut suit seemed less blimpy than under the robe in the photo. His hair was now parted left, instead of right—more a barber’s decision than a political statement, I figured. Beyond the hair issues, the Cotton Mather sharpness of his features—I used to think I could slice Aunt Phyllis’s challah with the knife-edge of his nose—had softened with more padding; the angle of his jaw had become less Superman. These I counted as improvements. Yes, there were the wrinkles around the eyes and the chin sag, but no major facial erosion. And when he paced up front with a bounce in his gait, I could see hardly any paunch beyond the unbuttoned suit jacket. Charlie was fifty-four and I’d bet he was still a runner. Aigoo, was he a runner.
After he’d nimbly dispatched with the Q and A, it was over. By the time I stood to work my way toward the aisle, a crush of admiring students had surrounded him. There was no way I was going to take a ticket to talk to a man I had once screwed. I didn’t have to. Charlie called out, “Judith!” I waved. Nothing fancy. And then I heard him excuse himself. Next moment, he was leaning over the first-row seats to clasp both my hands in both of his. Thus linked, I made my way to the aisle.
His eyes were sparkling. “My God, it is you.” As if there were hordes of big-bosomed women with almond-shaped eyes and gold cello charms hung from their necks to choose from. “What are you doing here?”
“I figured it was my chance to learn the intricacies of the electoral college. Just in case I ever decide to enroll.”
He chuckled. “Well, for whatever reason, I’m delighted you’re here. Good God, Judith, it’s been how long? Twenty-five years?”
“Soon to be twenty-six.”
“Let me take a look at you.” We were still hands-in-hands and now he pulled out for a body-riding appraisal. Thank you, Nordstrom’s, for the miraculous tummy-tuck jeans. “Still beautiful. It’s amazing. You really haven’t changed.”
“I have actually, but now’s not the time to go into detail.” The restless buzz from the students gathered at the lectern was spiraling.
“Right. We must catch up, though.” His forehead wrinkled. “Damn, I wish I were free tonight, but Manhattan calls. I’ve got a meeting I can’t miss. My car should be here”—he checked his watch—“about now.”
Before he gave me back my hands, he ran his thumb over the ring finger of my left one. Typical Charlie move. According to Emily Post or his mommy dearest, Kiki Pruitt, or whoever had taught Charlie the minutiae of etiquette, it would have been crass to cop a glimpse of my finger, so he’d found a discreet way to establish that the old girlfriend wasn’t wearing a wedding band.
“You’re in the phone book?”
“Well, no actually.” I managed to get that out just as a large woman with a Goucher name tag touched his shoulder.
“I hate to interrupt, Your Honor, but your fans are waiting.”
“I play with the Maryland Philharmonic,” I said.
“I’ll find you,” His Honor answered. “May I call you?”
Now that got me—the request for permission that was pure Pruitt. I was doing just fine until that exquisitely polite expression of noblesse oblige from the haves to the haves-less. A ridiculous notion of power, my notion yanked from my insecure old times in Boston. He was just being his natural charming self. I nodded, feeling a lump bob in my throat.
“We’ll talk” were his last words before he was led away. Correction: “Judith,” with a smile and an incredulous shake of his head, was his actual last word.
• • •
Back at my car, I had second, third and fourth thoughts. Did I really need this foray into the past? If Charlie said he’d call, he’d call. And where would that lead? Nowhere was the best option. Somewhere was the worst. Final destination for both: dead end.
As I gazed morosely at a cherry tree that had just begun to shed, a Lincoln Town Car drove up and parked. Charlie’s ride. To ferry him to the airport or Penn Station or all the way to New York and his Park Avenue apartment, transmogrified in my mind to a penthouse with a John Singer Sargent portrait of Great-Great-Grandmama Pruitt over the sofa and a butler on call in the pantry.
So there it was. All laid out for me in living color. Charlie and I moved in different worlds that would only collide if we tried to nudge them closer.
What had I been thinking?
Chapter 3
On Monday morning, my only guaranteed day off in the week, I was in my neurologist’s office for the first of my post-aneurysm yearly checkups.
I was fine. Dr. Creswell, God bless him, got that out of the way fast.
“We had a look at the 3-D angiogram of your brain and the radiologist and I concur: Everything looks just the way it should in there. No surprises. Coils are sitting pretty.” He showed me the computer image of the platinum coils and the stent sealing off the vascular bubble that could have killed me. “Nothing remarkable like baby aneurysms hiding out. You should be good as new.”
After exhaling the breath I’d been holding since waking up that morning, I grumbled—just for effect—“Some new. I’m going to be fifty in a few months.” He and I were both aware there had been a time when we weren’t sure I’d make it through the surgery, let alone to this milestone.
“Fifty, huh?” He checked the chart. “Could have fooled me. Well, there’s no reason to believe you don’t have another fifty ahead of you.”
I thought of Lulu Cho and said, “I’d like that in writing, please.”
He laughed. “And I’d like to give it to you. But what I’ve learned in my thirty years of practice is there’s no such thing as a sure thing in medicine. No guarantees. I’m a doctor, not a fortune-teller.”
Under the circumstances, ouch.
“What I can say is that everything looks good at the moment. I wish I could tell that to all my patients. This was a positive report, Judith. Go out and celebrate, and I’ll see you next year.”
• • •
When I called Marti to tell her that Creswell had given me an all clear, she whooped and said, “Fantastic news. Couldn’t be happier for you and your empty head.
And perfect timing—we can follow doctor’s orders and celebrate at Tio Pepe’s.”
Marti patched together a respectable income from a number of part-time jobs—contributing editor at Toque Blanche magazine, food columnist for The Gourmet Travel Digest, head honcho at the blog Hot and Juicy, and her favorite: restaurant critic for the Baltimore Herald newspaper.
“Tio’s is long overdue for a review,” she said. “You can have your gastronomic orgasm. The sole with bananas.” It was the restaurant’s signature dish, decadently rich and my downfall.
I loved Tio’s, but it was a low-ceilinged whitewashed grotto with the worst acoustics in town, which meant that everyone shouted and everyone heard what everyone was shouting. The regulars tended to know one another and table-hop nonstop, so it was like a bar mitzvah, only with shrimp. The place was jammed when I arrived. I waved to a Maryland Phil flutist as I made my way to our table. Marti was dressed in her restaurant reviewer’s mufti, a large shadow-casting black straw hat and sunglasses that fooled no one, including the staff. Grinning, she gave me a thumbs-up, which might have triggered what happened next. As I slipped into the seat across from her and the waiter handed me my menu, I felt swamped by a wave of unadulterated joy—the first in a long time—which I attributed to having been given the green light on life that morning. Probably given. My grandma Roz would have been muttering kinehoras from the grave. But my live mother, quoting Buddha, overrode Raphael ghosts knocking on the wood of their own coffins: “Not dream of past, not dwell in future, live in present. This is true happiness, Judith.”
“Earth to Judith, hell-o? You all right, kiddo?” Marti was tapping her spoon to her water glass for attention.
“Huh? Fine. I didn’t realize it until I smelled the garlic, but I’m starved.”
“Yeah, taking a pass on death will do that for you.”
We ordered half the menu to sample.
“Save enough room for dessert. Gotta have dessert. Which reminds me . . .” Marti flung down her napkin. “Be right back.”
When she returned wearing a cryptic smirk, we settled down to the serious business of journalistic eating, passing tastes and opinions to each other while Marti took notes under the drape of the tablecloth.
Nearly an hour and eight dishes later, as the busboy began to clear the table, she said, “Bueno. Three stars. Some things never change, thank God. Okay, now that your tummy’s full and your mood is mellow, tell me how it went with you and The Barrister. Did he ravish you on the steps of Haebler Chapel?”
“How did you—?” The woman confounded me.
“Oh, puh-leeze,” she cut me off. “As if you could have stayed away. He’s like cream to your cat. Talk.”
“Not much to talk about. We had maybe two minutes with students milling around. He’s still charming. Attractive.”
“Uh-oh.”
“He was happy to see me. Stunned, but in a good way.”
“And you?”
I shrugged. “It was a dumb move, stirring up all that old Charlie shit. I probably should have left well enough alone.”
Marti scowled. “I’ve always hated that phrase. ‘Well enough alone.’ If all of us left well enough alone, life would be incredibly boring. But maybe in this case . . .”
I stared into my wineglass.
“Stop second-guessing yourself, Judith. If you hadn’t wanted to see him, you wouldn’t have gone to the lecture. Don’t evil eye me. A woman’s heart knows a woman’s heart. Maybe you and I don’t march to the same drummer sexually, but the heart is not the pussy. Speaking of which, I’ll bet you didn’t sleep with Geoff this weekend.”
“I couldn’t have been less in the mood. I had my period.” For the first time in months, after I thought it had vanished forever.
“Well, aren’t you Britney Spears. You do know Geoff’s going to be heartbroken if you run off with The Barrister.”
I played with my knife. “If you’re so concerned about Geoff, why did you bait me with the article about Charlie? I don’t get it. I thought you liked Geoff.”
“Me? Hell, I love Geoff. If you loved Geoff, I never would have brought it up. But you don’t seem to take him seriously and—”
“It’s Geoff who doesn’t take me seriously,” I interrupted.
“—appreciate him. Maybe there’s unresolved Charlie stuff in the way. So I figure you stop by, say hello, see what he looks like with a fat ass from sitting on the bench for thirteen years, get a whiff of the Hah-vad accent that can’t possibly impress you anymore, say ‘Nice meeting you again and thanks for most of the memories’ and be done with him forever. Finally flush him out of your system so there’s room for Geoff. But it didn’t work that way, did it?”
I slugged the last of the white sangria. “Charlie wants to get together. To catch up.” Marti gave off a low hum. “Please don’t read more into it than old friends having a reunion.”
“Oh, definitely and positively. And you won’t go, of course. When is this so-called, never-to-be-realized reunion taking place?”
“He said he’d call.”
“Nothing worse than waiting for a call from a once and/or future lover. Don’t you dare let me catch you mooning by the phone like some teenager.”
“Not to worry. I haven’t been a teenager since . . . Come to think of it, I was never a teenager. Not the way you mean, with the dating and the phoning and the acting goofy. On the other hand, maybe I should make up for it now. Turn sweet sixteen instead of freakin’ fifty.”
“Now that is a brilliant idea!” Marti exclaimed.
As if on cue, a server emerged at my elbow with a slab of pine nut roll the size of a cedar shingle crowned with a single lit candle. I shot my lunch partner a poisonous arrow of a look. She’d done this dirty deed behind my back.
“Feliz cumpleaños, Señora,” the handsome young waiter said, placing the pinwheel of custard and cake in front of me.
“Señorita. And she’s going to be fifty—can you believe that?” Marti drawled in her Georgia accent.
“Oh jeez,” I said through gritted teeth. “Thanks a lot.”
The waiter managed a reserved smile.
“Blow, honey.” She glanced up at him. “Her, not you. Come on, Judith, make your wish.”
I closed my eyes and fervently wished the waitstaff wouldn’t burst into the happy birthday song.
My wish was granted, but after the server backed off, I hissed at Marti, “I can’t believe you did this. My birthday’s not until June.”
“Big whoppin’ deal. A few months.” She extended a finger, plowed a line of pine nuts off the custard, and sucked. “Basic rule of thumb: Never turn down cake. And you can consider this your first party. Your pre-party. Didn’t your mama ever tell you there’s no such thing as too many parties?”
Grace Raphael (née Ryang Yun Mi), the former party girl, no longer knew from parties after my father skipped town two weeks after my sixth birthday. His business as a purveyor of lox and whitefish was floundering when he went west for a national smoked-fish conference, caught a live one—a rich, older woman—and never looked back. Lorna Chippendale aka “the chippie” aka the second Mrs. Raphael wasn’t inclined to share her bounty with Irwin’s first family and he wasn’t punctilious about child support. Right after the split, he sent some money, some herring, a few presents. Then he faded away.
On her salary as a sewing machine operator at a bathing suit factory, my mother made sure we had enough to eat and a roof over our heads. And music lessons for me. Which were, in her mind, as much a necessity as milk and bread. There wasn’t much left over for indulgences.
“I never had a birthday party in my life. At least none I can remember,” I said, not uncheerily thanks to the sangria.
My confession precipitated an astounded whisk of breath. Then Marti said, “You never told me that. If that isn’t the most pitiful thing I’ve ever heard.
Makes me want to cry.” She was a tough broad; tears were generally off-limits. She wasn’t crying now, but her classic features were squinched in sympathy. “You never had a birthday party. We’ve got to rectify that.” Her eyes were way too bright. “Lordy, Lordy, I am so ready to rectify.”
“Marti . . .”
“Okay, I’m thinking fifty guests. One for each year of your life. And a theme.” A warning tingle fired through me as Marti waxed enthusiastic. “You have to have a theme. Hawaii is hot this year. Leis, mai tais with the little umbrellas. And the men could wear those tacky flowered shirts.”
She was putting me on with the Hawaiian business. Maybe. You never knew with Marti.
Oh God.
• • •
“Of course you have birthday party,” my mother said later that afternoon. “First-year party, Tol, very important in Korea. Baby survive so we celebrate. In Korea, party held in banquet hall but I have only few Korean friends so we hold at home. Many balloons. Many gifts. You wear hanbok and I put makeup on you, like tradition. Aunt Phyllis try to make cake like saeng cream cake with canned fruit.” She threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, so awful. But she try.”
We were in the activity room of Blumen House, the assisted living complex where my mother lived. Really, the activity room was where she lived. She dropped into her fourth-floor apartment for sleep and breakfast, and took lunch and dinner in the communal dining room. But mornings were spent in the activity room playing gin rummy and canasta, afternoons were dedicated to mah-jongg marathons, and betweentimes she gambled online on one of the computers provided for residents.
I’d waited fifteen minutes for her to finish her mah-jongg game, which was conducted with all the fervor of a blood sport. Because she’d won the two-dollar pot, she was in a good mood.
“You pick out violin, remember I tell you.”
