Happy Any Day Now

by Toby Devens

  “And I’d make a lousy wife for a United States Supreme Court justice.”

  “You’re wonderful. I love you. And you’re going to make someone the absolutely right wife. God knows, I wish it were me.”

  Were, not was. That Choate education.

  “But it’s not going to work for us.”

  And that was it.

  Or not, because for decades after, Charlie was with me. I subscribed to the New York Times so I could check for articles about him. I read his father’s obituary. The engagement announcement with the photo of his wife to be. She was gorgeous. Blond and not dumb, a psychologist. I didn’t see a wedding announcement, though I scoured for it. I read Chloe’s birth announcement, cut it out, and put it in an unlabeled box I’d dedicated to Charlie stuff. Then I went into the bathroom and threw up.

  Ten years ago I canceled the Times subscription. My shrink and I agreed Google was too much of a temptation, but by now I was driven by mere curiosity. The fire had burned itself out finally.

  From the lack of interest since the Goucher meeting, I figured Charlie had no intention of stirring the embers. Me either. I didn’t see the point in raking dead ashes. And yet, there seemed to have been a spark between us in that lecture hall. With Charlie, it had been a long time since I’d trusted my judgment. Yes? No? His silence told me no.

  Chapter 6

  Old joke: Woman stops policeman to ask for directions. “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Cop answers: “Practice, lady, practice.”

  My mother didn’t get it. “Of course practice. How else you get to Carnegie Hall?”

  The first time I went there as a solemn little girl of nine, I’d been playing cello for two years. My aunt Phyllis, a social worker with the only cultural pretensions in the Raphael family, had bought tickets for her and my uncle Arnold for a Sunday afternoon performance. Last minute, they couldn’t go. So Mom and I inherited the seats. The Cavendish Quartet sat in a pool of light onstage and played their collective heart out and I thought I was in the balcony of heaven.

  It took me another twenty-five years and a contract as tutti cellist with the Maryland Philharmonic, but I finally got to play Carnegie Hall. I’ve played there once a year since, fall or spring, and nothing—not sex, not even crème brûlée—gives me more of a high than walking onto those brushed oak floorboards to warm up.

  That’s what I was doing that sultry-for-April Saturday evening and the scene evoked the same swelling in my chest as it had the first time I’d set foot on that stage. Only tonight was bittersweet for me. It was Richard’s illness that had led to my solo debut here. I stopped to take it all in, and that’s when I heard Geoff, whose embouchure—the position his lips shaped around the trumpet’s mouthpiece—gave him a signature sound. He was working through a tricky part in the Stravinsky.

  I turned and nodded. He winked. Then it was down to business.

  People can and do approach the musicians in this nether time. Mothers haul little Dylan or Tiffany to the proscenium to ask the nice lady with the cello questions about how many hours a week she practices. Acquaintances walk up to say hello. Old boyfriends appear out of nowhere.

  From the stage with the houselights on, you can make out individual faces to about the tenth row. But I was focused on warming up, and even as he approached I didn’t see him coming. After I finished tinkering with my cello, I looked up and there he was. My heart lurched as if it had been jump-started.

  “Jesus, Charlie, you scared me!”

  He gave a low laugh. “Sorry, Ju-ju. I didn’t mean to startle you. I was aiming for a pleasant surprise.”

  Ju-ju. Holy God, I hadn’t heard that name in twenty-five years. Charlie had coined it at the height of our heat. I was his Ju-ju, he’d murmured in bed, his fetish, his lucky charm. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him that Ju-ju meant “breast milk” in Korean.

  “I said I’d find you.” He looked up with a Stan Laurel smile. Totally innocent. I wanted to say, Actually, you said you’d call, but I didn’t.

  He tapped his rolled program against his palm. “Looking forward to this. You know how I love Stravinsky.”

  Had I known? If so, I’d forgotten.

  “Look, I realize this is shamefully last minute, but I’m hoping you might be free for dinner.”

  “Tonight?” I said. I thought I saw Geoff’s large shadow looming. Someone behind me coughed baritone.

  “Tonight. And I apologize for not contacting you earlier to suggest it. This week was a killer. In any event, if you don’t have previous plans.”

  Now, had Geoff and I made a date for dinner, one on one, I like to think I wouldn’t have ditched him. But when the orchestra plays New York, a large group of us goes out together afterward to grab a bite. So . . .

  I waited a beat, wanting to make Charlie sweat for it. Charlie Pruitt, in his impeccable pin-striped suit and silk tie with a pattern of Harvard crests, was no schvitzer. He was a first-class lawyer who relished winning an argument. “I’ll buy you the best steak in the city, or if you’ve converted to vegetarian, the most succulent white asparagus this side of the Loire. And the place I have in mind does a mean crème brûlée.” That last was to let me know he remembered my favorite dessert. To clinch the deal, he broke out the dazzling Pruitt smile.

  At twenty, I’d found the slight overbite irresistible. Pushing fifty, I managed to resist it for about ten seconds before succumbing with a stammer: “Dinner. Yes, fine. Sure. Of course.” I caught a breath and moved to an articulate finish. “Give me twenty minutes after curtain and I’ll meet you at the artists’ entrance.”

  Charlie bobbed a little bow to convey his gratitude. Then he said, “You’ve made an old guy very happy.” He was only fifty-four. That old-guy crapola had to be an affectation or his idea of a joke. But if it wasn’t either . . . I was forty-nine. What did that make me?

  In spite of my advanced age, I had no problem with the Don Juan, which can be a little dodgy in the middle. For just a moment in the second movement, I lost my focus. Oh God, Charlie is out there! But I lassoed it back. Twenty-two minutes after the last bravo faded, seven after I made hurried excuses to the second violin who’d organized our group dinner, and five after I scribbled an explanatory note to Geoff, I walked, Charlie guiding me with his hand on my elbow, from the Fifty-Seventh Street exit to the curb where his driver waited.

  • • •

  “I hope you like this surprise better than the first,” Charlie said ten minutes later.

  He’d taken my hand to help me exit the Town Car and now it was folded into his very warm one as I stood on the sidewalk, peering through Manhattan’s fragrant spring darkness.

  “Your mother’s place?” We were in front of the apartment building where Kiki had grilled me like a burger that first/last time I met her. I shivered at the thought of resuming our acquaintance.

  “Look up.”

  The Pruitt co-op, the approximate size of a football field, was on the nineteenth floor.

  “No.” Charlie tipped my chin with his finger to guide my gaze. “Way up.” And suddenly it became clear.

  “The roof garden?”

  “One and the same. I hope you don’t mind. The steak and the crème brûlée were bait and switch. I thought a picnic would be nice.”

  Based on our history, that could have been the most romantic gesture since Romeo and Juliet. Of course, considering how that pair ended up, maybe not the wisest. I felt myself losing it, so I leapt over the messy emotions to my sense of humor.

  “Again? We had a picnic up there twenty-seven years ago. Can’t you come up with anything new?”

  When the tipping finger brushed my cheek, I said, “It’s a lovely idea, Charlie.”

  On our first date in New York, spring vacation of my senior year, Charlie had arranged dinner for two up among the trees in planters and the pots of impatiens on the building’s roof gard
en. There were no tables, so he’d spread a blanket, and as the moon rose over the East River we ate pâté, lobster salad, and chocolate mousse and drank champagne. I’d wanted to make love under the stars, but Charlie was afraid the doorman might stumble upon us during his nightly rounds, so we did it his way, the conservative way. We went down to the Pruitts’ apartment—Kiki and Don were at the house in Maine—and made love in his parents’ bed. So sinful. So heady. So nauseating. A half hour later, wine, butter, and chocolate churning, I raced to his mother’s bathroom and threw up in her bidet. You can take the girl out of Brooklyn . . .

  Tonight there was a wrought-iron table set for two.

  “This is a common area. But a little baksheesh, a little shmear”—he rubbed his fingertips together—“for the doorman and the cleaning crew buys a lot of privacy.” A descendant of the founding fathers shmeared. I loved this country. “No one will bother us, I promise.”

  Charlie hooked up his iPod to a portable speaker and lit a couple of fishnet table candles to augment the soft light cast by the torchieres. He emptied the contents of the picnic basket and arranged napkins, silverware, and the food: roast chicken, green salad, whole-wheat baguettes. Dessert was two chocolate-dipped strawberries.

  “Les Palmiers?” I asked, remembering the French restaurant around the corner that had provided the food first time around.

  “Ah, long gone.” Les Palmiers had been our restaurant. Spring break, summer, Christmas—when they dressed a tree with antique French ornaments—we celebrated there. Our three-month anniversary, six months, one year. At first Charlie seemed proud to show me off—an exotic, almond-eyed, small-boned brunette, not your standard blond thick-ankled Mount Holyoke deb. I was the perfect weapon for a postponed adolescent rebellion. But when things started going downhill between us—as his mother hammered away at the inappropriateness of his choice—we stopped going to Les Palmiers. By that time I suppose I’d become an embarrassment to him. Or maybe he just didn’t want to sully the good memories with the grime that love picks up on the slide.

  Now he piled my plate with salad. “I hope you don’t mind the menu. I’ve got to watch my cholesterol. Those strawberries are for you. I know how you love your chocolate.”

  He played with the iPod and released the damaged voice of Édith Piaf. Just as we’d had our restaurant, Charlie and I also had our song, plucked from its background music: “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

  “I have burnt my memories, my sorrows, my pleasures. I don’t need them anymore. Swept away the love affairs and all their tremblings,” the Little Sparrow sang. Oh, brother.

  Halfway through the salad, Charlie presented the requisite photo of his daughter. At seventeen Chloe was a stepped-up version of Kiki—same retroussé nose that made her look as if she were sniffing something slightly off, and the mouth was unadulterated Van Tiller.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said, handing it back. “Sorry. I can’t reciprocate. I used to have a cat. Oedipuss. But he died four years ago and I don’t carry his picture.” I smiled to show this was supposed to be witty, not bitter.

  Give him this, Charlie laughed. He reached across the table and stroked the back of my free hand. The one that wasn’t lifting the glass of pinot grigio for another sip. The rest of my wine went down while we caught up. His ex-wife and the amicable divorce. Rebound Todd got a mention from me. Charlie’s parents—Don dead of pancreatic cancer, Kiki alive but on the verge of gaga. My mother. I never should have told him she’d been a bar girl in Seoul. That had been the beginning of the end. “You ever see your father?” He knew that piece of history, too.

  “Once, twenty years ago, when he came east for Grandma Roz’s funeral. I pretty much kept my distance. But he ambushed me as we entered the cemetery and tried to make conversation. I wasn’t interested. Too little, too late.”

  I didn’t go into what we’d exchanged on that knoll at Beth David. Irwin had retorted, “Life’s short, Judy. How about you and me try to pick up the pieces?”

  “Judith. Don’t call me Judy. And you can pick them up, but you can’t glue them together, Irwin, so what’s the point?”

  “Very philosophic. You’re a smart girl, kiddo. Judith. Brains are good—you got that from your mother’s side. Okay, maybe Aunt Phyllis. But you gotta be careful about not outsmarting yourself. I’m not seeing too much heart here. And what’s with the ‘Irwin’? Is that the way you talk to your father?”

  Bad move. I’d wheeled on him then, drilling my heel into the loamy earth. He was so close to the open grave and it was such a temptation to give him a shove. “Enough,” I said. “Really. You don’t want to start. Not here.”

  “Where then? Life’s short, as I said.”

  “Very philosophic. I’ll let you know.”

  Charlie refilled my glass and his own. “You’re not strong on forgiveness, then?” Which cued us to the chicken and The Apology.

  He removed his blazer. We were going at this in shirtsleeves.

  “I appreciate your meeting with me, Judith. I wasn’t sure you would because, God knows, I treated you shabbily. It took a while for me to comprehend how shabbily.

  “You need to hear— No, that’s not true. I need to tell you that I did love you. You do know that? I loved you as much, more probably, than I’ve ever loved anyone.”

  Wow. I leaned against the chair’s cushion to remind me I had a backbone. Also to support my head, which might have fallen off my neck from shock and bounced over the railing onto Sutton Place twenty-two stories below and, well, there goes the neighborhood.

  “I was a kid, a selfish kid. What did I know about loyalty or the pain I’m sure I caused you?”

  Oh no, he wasn’t getting off the hook that easily. The alcohol gave me courage. “You knew what was important to you, Charlie. The law. Your family. That’s what you traded me in for. And it worked out for you.” His face had drained to white. “You’re a prominent judge with all the trimmings. I’m sure you picked the perfect wife for the job. Maybe the marriage didn’t last, but it was good for a while, right? And it gave you Chloe. Your mother must adore her. Does she—your mother—know we’re having this little tête-à-tête?”

  “I wasn’t sure we were even having this tête-à-tête. I took a major risk you’d send me packing. Besides, I doubt Kiki would know who you are, Ju-ju. It was a long time ago and her memory’s dicey.”

  “I remember her. What a character.” I toyed with my chicken. “She would have been hell on wheels as a mother-in-law. I ducked the bullet on that one.”

  “You did indeed.” Charlie chuckled, but when I looked up, I saw his eyes were filled. I’d seen him cry only once in all the years we were together, and that was when Reba died. “I just want you to know I am sorry. Deeply sorry. You’d been abandoned once; I did it to you again. What a bastard I was. So I guess I deserve to be in Irwin’s spot. I can’t ask you to forgive me.”

  Dear God, how long had I been waiting for this? “Sure you can. You just did, Charlie.”

  And that’s the way I left it because, what the hell, he did deserve to wonder if I forgave him. It was the least I could do. The great unanswered hovered between us, but he knew better than to push.

  I took my strawberries and moved toward the railing. Charlie followed me. We stood together gazing at the East River, silver in the moonlight, with the lights from the Queensboro Bridge arcing a spangle of stars over Roosevelt Island. Charlie’s shoulder brushing mine charged the still air with an electricity I hadn’t felt in twenty-five years. More than that, I felt something around my heart give way. After the breakup, when he’d left the Cambridge house schlepping the last of his books, the semipermeable cardiac membrane that allows love and trust to filter in had hardened into my shield. Emblazoned with “Never Again,” it stayed tough through Todd, through Geoff. As I stood there with the apology still fresh, I felt it give a little.

  I bit into a chocolate-dipped
strawberry. There’s nothing like chocolate to haul you into the moment.

  Charlie stared down into the anonymous city. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, but I ended a relationship recently. You may have read about it in the tabloids. No? Well, that’s refreshing. I was seeing Carolyn Brinks.”

  “The newscaster?” How did I miss that with gossip-hound Marti around? Carolyn Brinks, star reporter, famous for her international coverage and interviews with heads of state. I recalled hearing somewhere her father had been busted for running a Ponzi scheme in the downturn a few years back. Got jail time. Now here we had a scenario that sounded vaguely familiar. Accomplished dark-haired woman with a disreputable background. Hmm.

  “For the record, it was an amicable, mutual parting of the ways. Carrie really had no time for extracurricular activities. And when we managed to find some, the paparazzi were all over us. I’m uncomfortable in that kind of limelight. In case you forgot, I’m a pretty conservative guy.” No kidding.

  He turned as I did. We traded stares. He asked, “And you, are you involved with anyone?”

  “I have been.”

  Okay, so I didn’t think before I spoke. It was all uncensored and Freud would have had a field day. Have been, I’d said. Not as bad as had been. But not nearly as honest as am.

  Charlie might have requested details; I might have elaborated. But we each caught a breath, and on our simultaneous exhale his cell phone rang out the theme to Brideshead Revisited. He’d loved that PBS show. Our show. “Damn,” he grumbled. He checked the screen. “Sorry. I have to take this.”

  It really was an emergency. His mother’s housekeeper, talking loud enough for me to follow, advised him that Mrs. Pruitt had passed out in the middle of watching some liberal pundit on CNN. She’d regained consciousness, but was still light-headed. The 911 responders were on their way.

  “Her doctor’s been working on regulating her blood pressure medication,” Charlie said as he hustled us toward the door. “That’s probably what’s going on, but just to be sure it’s not a ministroke, it’s a good idea to have the medics check her out.”