He wasn’t supposed to be here; Eliot said . . . what did Eliot say? “I’m sorry,” Caroline is whispering, “I didn’t think he would . . . ” But Faith is hardly listening.
“Faith,” Jack says when she is standing in front of him. (Did Caroline steer her over? Or did she come, like some dumb magnet, of her own accord?) He is nodding slightly, distantly—looking over her shoulder as if there is another, more reasonable, more adult Faith there beside her—the mother of Faith the troublesome, frivolous little girl.
All her words have been knocked flat—even the stumbling, faltering ones that come to her when she is nervous lie prostrate, as indecipherable as colors under a blind woman’s hand.
“Poor Eliot,” Caroline says. “He really kind of froze up onstage.”
“Hmph,” Jack says. Faith has not seen him since he brought Eliot down to New York to stay with her over Thanksgiving. He looks both exactly the same as he always has and completely different.
“Poor Eliot,” Faith repeats dumbly.
“He just got shaken up,” Caroline says. “I’m sure he was surprised to see you. We thought—last we heard, you were supposed to be at a meeting. . . .” There is a snap of irritation in her voice. Caroline has always known how to handle Jack in a way Faith never learned. Even at Eliot’s age she could reprove him for things Faith wouldn’t dream of.
Faith can see Eliot’s shiny blue costume across the crowd—the other minutemen have rushed past him up the stairs and into the crowd of parents, but Eliot is lingering, hanging back at the top of the stairs, talking to a tall, striking-looking man with dark, almost shoulder-length hair and a video camera. He looks over as Faith stares and catches her eye. The blood rushes to her cheeks. They have been talking about her. Or about her and Jack and Caroline standing here in this awkward configuration.
“So how’s New York?” Jack says.
“Fine,” Faith says. “All right.” The words are beginning to return, limping back like injured animals. “And Concord?”
Jack grunts dismissively—as if it is a foolish, inappropriate question.
Behind him, the red setter streaks past, followed by even more yelping children.
“You still see the Delaneys?” Jack lets his eyes touch on Faith, the real Faith, not the one he wants to see beside her. Quickly he redirects them at the ceiling.
“Oh,” Faith says. She is surprised that he remembers them—old friends of her family whose Christmas party she used to force Jack to attend with her, long ago, when they were first married. “I do. They still live in that same place with the lions outside and they still have—I went to their Christmas party.” She stops, somewhat breathless. It was a sad affair, really—with all the same people, only everyone was so much older.
“Aha,” Jack says, with a spark of genuine interest, and for a moment Faith feels something break free from the dark discarded heap their married life has become in her mind—some ragged but still-sparkling streamer. “The De-stingys,” he used to call them, on account of their serving nothing but melba toast and sardines with their highballs—and he and Faith would go out to the Oak Bar for steaks and chocolate mousse cake afterward.
“I saw George Burt, actually,” Faith offers. George Burt is Jack’s lawyer. “It was so strange to see him there. . . .” Faith feels herself coloring again. It was strange because the only context she knows him in is the litigation over their divorce, which Jack is perfectly well aware of. Why has she started down this path?
Jack’s expression has frozen over. “Well,” he says coolly. “That must have been”—he pauses significantly—“overwhelming.”
Faith stares at him. No, she would like to say. No, it was not. But she can only stand there in tense, terrible silence, looking at the space where only a moment ago she could see this sweet, heartbreaking flutter.
“Coffee, anyone?” Caroline asks, clearing her throat.
Faith shakes her head and looks down, begins working the clasp on her purse open and closed between her pale fingers. It was funny, for a moment, how she had almost forgotten.
SITTING AT A WHITE-CLOTHED table in the inventively named Garden Restaurant of Belmont Center with Caroline, Faith, and Eliot Dunlap, Rock has an almost uncontrollable desire to get high. He has gone out to his car twice, under the pretense of needing to use the “gents’,” to check whether there might possibly—in the glove compartment, under the passenger-side floor mat, in the first-aid kit in the trunk—be at least some small, mostly smoked joint. But there is nothing. Nothing.
The Garden has a generic, movie-set-like quality, which, Caroline has explained, is exactly why she chose it: it contains nothing familiar, no possibilities of running into anyone. Since her breakdown, Faith Dunlap brings out a fierce, take-charge side of Caroline; in her presence, Caroline is suddenly protector and vigilante, the kind of person who knows how to cure hiccups and steer conversations, whether to treat a spill with salt or soda water. Just watching her is making Rock tired. And the weird blandness of the restaurant makes him feel edgy; the decor looks as if it were assembled by aliens following a set of instructions: a restaurant must have potted palm trees in the corners, chef’s salad on the menu, unremarkable watercolors of beaches and wild animals. Rock is sure the place is a front for something unorthodox.
“What would we do without you?” Faith says for what must be the thirty-seventh time. “It was so good of you to drive us here.” The conversation since they left BCD has been like air traffic control—both tense and incredibly boring.
“Mom,” Caroline says. “Okay. We’re here.”
Faith seems unfazed by her daughter’s exasperation.
“No problem,” Rock says. He had no choice; Jack took off in the car Caroline drove over.
The day has definitely not gone as Rock planned. Or at least it has not gone as he imagined. He would never have sat through the full hour of manipulative historical docudrama acted out by preadolescents if he had not thought he could lure Caroline out to Singing Beach afterward, or to Somerville to go record shopping. Instead, here he is, three hours later, sitting at the Garden picking at a possibly botulism-ridden tuna salad beamed in from Mars.
In his new role as Dunlap family chauffeur, Rock has subjected the entire family to the gritty seats and sour milk smell of his shit-brown Toyota. He has also made fifteen minutes of awkward conversation with his old sixth-grade teacher and twice been mistaken for one of the Dunlap twins and slapped violently on the back by their thuggish, middle-aged ex-golf partners. Possibly worst of all, he has had to endure being featured in his stepmother-to-be’s condescending, ten-minute-long treatise about the modest aspirations of college graduates today, which she delivered to an audience of the pretentious, cool-guy filmmaker “friend” of hers—whom Rock suspects she’s sleeping with, Caroline—and a panicked-looking, obviously inattentive Faith Dunlap.
Before Bensen’s Organic closed down last week to make room for the expansion of InfoGraphix, its more successful next-door neighbor on Route 2, Rock would be working his shift, heaping dung onto the compost pile or tending to hydroponic tomatoes. While he was never “taken by the possibilities of all this environmentally conscious sustainable agriculture stuff,” as his father likes to spin the job to his friends (presumably to validate the four years of liberal arts education and twelve years of private schooling he paid for), Rock has always enjoyed manual labor. And right now he would give his left arm to be doing even the worst of his Bensen’s responsibilities—hosing down the petting-zoo pigs or mucking out the duck pond. Even listening to Linda Bensen go on about the restorative powers of moonstones and bladderwort would be better than this.
“The rolls?” Caroline is saying, and Rock realizes it is the second time she has asked him. She looks so pretty sitting there with her pink T-shirt and shakily parted hair—her thin browned forearms resting on the table.
“Right-io.” It comes out too loud and Rock nearly upsets his water glass reaching them to her.
“So has
Stephan been filming your rehearsals also?” Caroline asks Eliot.
Stephan, pronounced Ste-fahn with a pretentious soft ph and long ah. Rock notes. So she is on a first-name basis with this film guy, who, Rock is sure, is already boffing his soon-to-be stepmother.
Eliot shakes his head. They have been in the restaurant for fifteen minutes and he has not yet spoken. With the remnants of his makeup—the fluorescent afterglow of wiped-off lipstick, eyeliner, and a bluish cloud of whatever was used to darken his almost invisible eyebrows—he looks like a child porn star.
“What sort of movie is he making?” Faith asks. “Maybe you’ll be famous, Eliot.”
Eliot shrugs without looking at his mother.
“The Last of the WASPS—from Puritans to Preppies, or something,” Caroline quotes. “How does Denise know him anyway?” she asks Rock.
“From her days as an exotic dancer.” Rock puts his fork down.
“Right.” Caroline says giving him a fake smile.
“She . . . ?” Faith looks so genuinely shocked that Rock feels guilty.
“No, no—I’m just joking. She’s his lawyer—or she was his lawyer for the last movie he made or something.”
“I didn’t think that was right,” Faith says, folding her napkin into a triangle on her lap.
“I saw that movie—in my film class. I figured it out when I was talking to him,” Caroline says. “I couldn’t figure out why he looked so familiar at first.” There is a sort of musing interest in her voice, a change from the beleaguered holding-up-the-conversation tone she has had up until now. Does she have a crush on him? The guy is, Rock has to admit, handsome. Has exactly the sort of exotic, tall-dark-stranger looks girls seem to equate with being smart, sensitive, and soulful. Caroline was chatting with him when Rock came back from his cigarette break; she was laughing and running her hand along her collarbone in, now that Rock thinks about it, a suggestively intimate way. And the guy certainly made a beeline for her—Rock saw him excuse himself from some no-doubt awful conversation with Denise and Mamie Starks and zoom over to her.
“He must be very talented,” Faith says, pushing a piece of feta off her salad.
“Why?” Caroline asks.
“Well—I mean, it’s very hard to make a movie—or at least, I know it used to be, maybe it’s gotten easier, but there’s so much behind the scenes, I don’t know, talking, and applying . . . Your uncle Merrill wanted so badly to make it in Hollywood and it was so hard, so expensive.”
“But Merrill is an idiot, Mom—he wanted to when? In between wanting to start that ridiculous antique business and wanting to be a professional polo player?”
“Well,” Faith says, rearranging her fork and knife apologetically on her plate. “He had a lot of dreams.”
Looking at her bowed head, the neat, gray-blond part, and her thin fingers, the ropy veins on the backs of her hands, Rock has the sudden hopeless feeling he gets watching those nature shows about baby wildebeests that can’t get up and walk in time to keep up with the herd, or mother zebras with broken legs who have to be left at lonely watering holes to die. There is something about Faith that seems so inviting of disaster. Rock wasn’t surprised when she ended up in Maclean’s last year—in a way it is her presence back in the real world that is surprising.
“I had a dream last night,” Eliot says—he is looking at the corner of the table rather than anyone in particular—“that you were dead.”
There is the sound of forks clinking, the wind flapping the awning outside the open window, the waiter calling something over his shoulder as he steps out of the kitchen—missteps, actually—and nearly drops his tray.
“Me?” Faith is more mouthing than saying, sitting back as if she has been slapped.
“That’s terrible, El,” Caroline says.
Rock’s stomach lets out an inappropriate growl.
“Oh, Eliot,” Faith says. There are tears welling up in her eyes. The shadow of the American Legion flag flutters up the side of the building next door like a flame.
6
SINCE LEAVING THE PLAY yesterday, Jack has gotten a car wash, closed a deal, chaired a board meeting, talked John Liggat into selling his stake in the Lambrecht venture, and swung by Tarbell’s Toys and Models to pick up the miniature Franklin stove, Mason & Tuttle minuteman figures, and new glue gun he needs for the diorama he is finishing. The numbness in his head and splintery feeling in his stomach he had after leaving Colby Kesson has been steamrolled by the familiar combination of frustration and bitterness that seeing his ex-wife inspires in him. It fuels him to get things done, be productive, keep moving.
What happened to the pretty, shy Faith Cartwright he married? What happened to the young woman who used to crew for him on his grandfather’s sailboat, or ski down the toughest trails on Whistler Mountain behind him in avalanche season? That Faith Dunlap was quiet, sweet, and often uncertain, but not the meek, wounded little bird-woman who trembled her way through the BCD lobby yesterday morning. The present Faith is, perhaps, better than the veritable madwoman who checked herself into Maclean’s last year. That Faith believed a carful of Cuban doctors were trying to steal her kidneys. But this Faith—she is still so goddamn timid and fragile. And Jack sees this as a personality of her own choosing, the product of her own actions; what was it if not her desire to get divorced that caused the breakdown in the first place? And all the therapy and self-help books and yoga classes he has been forced to foot the bill for have left her exactly where he predicted.
It would be almost vindicating if he didn’t know she blamed him. Which is absurd; he never asked for a divorce or told her to go live on her own, five blocks from Harlem, in New York City. He isn’t the one who threw the carefully constructed model of her life—no, both of their lives, and the children’s—up into the air to watch it rain down in a million irreparable pieces. Jack knows this, but the vision of himself that he sees reflected in her wide, fidgety gray eyes contradicts this. It may be false, but it is clear enough to be persuasive.
On his way home from picking Caesar up from Jim Ridgeway’s, Jack pulls off Route 20 to the Keystone Steak House. He does not have to be in the office until noon today and he has called ahead for three orders of French toast, bacon, and sausage in honor of Caroline’s second morning home from college. He has always liked Keystone’s, with its old-fashioned bowl of mints by the door, its dignified dark green walls and working fireplace. When he was a boy, and then later, when he was newly married, whenever he was in Boston he would come here for Sunday brunches with his grandfather. They would inspect the old hunting prints and cartoons cut from the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper’s. “Pansies,” he can hear his grandfather saying about this one that depicts a horde of skinny, long-haired young men, brandishing anti-war signs, climbing the steps of the statehouse. “Thank god you’re not one of them.” The place has not changed much since then—a new sign outside, a glassed-in addition in the back, but otherwise the same unpretentious, straightforward, upstanding feeling.
Jack is pleased to have come up with the plan to come here, to have thought of calling ahead. At home, there is nothing in the refrigerator—maybe some cornflakes or whatever it is Eliot has for breakfast. He is, now that he thinks about it, looking forward to having Caroline home for a while—of course, not for too long, a young person has to make his own way in the world, but for the time being. And she is a young woman, after all; the need to go out and make a name for herself is less urgent than it is for the boys, whom Jack finds alarmingly unambitious. Hanging around a ski resort in Colorado is not what he had in mind when he paid for their Harvard educations.
He has more faith in Caroline, though. She has a good head on her shoulders. He has never had to chide her for bad grades or discipline her for the frivolous kind of pranks her brothers pulled off all the way through high school. Once, when she was ten, she was sent home from school early because she had gotten into a fight—a real physical fight in which she kicked a boy in the sto
mach. She would not say what started it and was silent that night while Faith served chicken and chattered about a neighbor’s new swimming pool or some other nonsense to relieve the tension. He called her a name, Caroline had said finally when Faith ducked back through the swinging door to get the pie out of the oven. Jack can still remember those steady gray eyes meeting his in challenge across the table. Hmm, he had said, and nodded, staring back at her. He did not ask what it was. But neither did he make her go straight upstairs to bed after dinner.
“Here you go, sir,” says the chirpy blond who has gone back to the kitchen to see about his order. “Anything else?” the woman asks. “Juice? Coffee?”
“No,” Jack says. “Thank you.” But then his eyes land on the cheesecake under the glass cake plate on the counter, which stirs some deep, long-forgotten fold of brain tissue. Cheesecake, which is Caroline’s favorite. He can’t think how he knows this, but he is quite certain. “Actually, yes. Cheesecake—three slices,” he says.
“Cheesecake?” the woman says doubtfully. It is too early for cheesecake, Jack realizes.
“Cheesecake,” he repeats firmly. It doesn’t matter, though. He will surprise his daughter.
There is no sign of activity when Jack walks through the kitchen door, bearing the warm Styrofoam boxes of French toast. There is a skittering sound from the mudroom and then a short burst of half-repressed barking. Brutus. Which is strange, because Jack left him outside last night. Someone has brought him in and penned him up overnight; the poor dog probably has to go to the bathroom. Jack lets him out of the pen and then the front door to join Caesar. He streaks to the middle of the lawn, where he squats and pees like a female. Jack frowns in the doorway.
The Hazards of Good Breeding Page 5
