Though I was mortified by my body odor, I walked over to give him a hug. As I extended my arms and leaned in for a welcoming embrace, he recoiled. No fucking way, I thought, stunned. I was a forty-year-old, happily married mother of two with a life I loved and career I was proud of—and yet, with a single gesture, I was instantly reduced to my scorned teenage self, standing at JFK’s International Arrivals terminal, getting rejected, once again, by Adam. He’d been gone only two weeks on a teen tour of Israel, but he’d left as my boyfriend and come back as Holly’s.
“Sorry,” he said apologetically, adjusting the black velvet yarmulke atop his lightly gelled hair. “I, um . . . it’s just a religious thing. Don’t take offense. I can’t touch any woman other than my wife.”
“Oh? Oh! No offense taken at all,” I said awkwardly.
“Let me tell you, getting the middle seat between two women on an airplane is hell for me,” he said with a smile. It seemed to be a joke he had told before, to put others, like me, at ease. I offered up a grin but then caught him glancing a second too long at my breasts, before he quickly averted his eyes. He was clearly embarrassed.
I instinctively folded my arms across my chest and wished I’d put on a bra that morning.
“Man, this house, wow! It’s incredible! And that view!” he said, as he rolled the cuffs of his white shirt up to his forearms and placed his hands on his hips.
The view truly was extraordinary. A few years earlier, when Sal and I purchased five densely wooded acres near the New York–Massachusetts border to build a cozy weekend cottage, we had no idea that clearing away some trees would lend itself to such breathtaking views of the Berkshire and Catskill mountains. I had to admit, it was the type of year-round scenery that would make a movie producer salivate—snowcapped peaks in winter; wide-open, pink-sky sunsets in summer; and rolling hills of golden, green, and crimson foliage as far as the eye could see throughout fall and spring.
“Where is everyone?” Adam asked.
“Actually, you’re the first to arrive,” I said.
“Oh, I’m too early! I’m sorry,” he said. He quickened the pace of his speech and started gesticulating with his hands, a nervous tendency I recalled. “I had to make these bakery deliveries to sleep-away camps in the area, and it turns out your house is a lot closer to them than I thought. Listen, I can drive around and come back. Do you need me to run some errands? You want milk, eggs, paper towels? You name it, I’ll get it. I’ve got GPS; just give me an address. There’s gotta be a supermarket or something nearby, right?”
“Don’t worry. It’s all good. Grab your bags and come inside. You must be famished. I’ve got a refrigerator filled with kosher food for you and Holly.”
He smiled. “You were always so thoughtful,” he said, and picked up two large duffel bags and a body-length pregnancy pillow. “Thank you.”
“You can drop your stuff in the guest bedroom next to the bathroom. It has the largest bed, so I figured it would be the most comfortable for Holly,” I said, before disappearing into my own room to change shirts and spackle on deodorant.
When I returned—wearing supportive undergarments and an opaque T-shirt—I found him sitting on a wicker barstool at the kitchen island, holding a carrot from the vegetable-hummus platter and mumbling some Hebrew words to himself. I recognized them as the blessing over food I learned in Hebrew school as a child.
Adam smiled at me from across the marble counter.
“Listen, Jord,” he said, his tone unexpectedly intimate, “I just want to say, before everyone gets here, that it was very cool of you to include us this weekend.”
“Sure! We’re all here for Becca. It wouldn’t be the same without Holly, and you too, of course,” I said cheerfully. I was trying.
“No, seriously, we haven’t seen you in years. It was very gracious of you. I know Holly would not have wanted to miss this.”
Just then, my cell phone whistled, announcing an incoming text message. I practically leaped to grab it, hoping it would be Becca. It was.
Hey! I’m coming up today after all! Sorry for the confusion. I hitched a ride with Holly. We’ll be there soon.
I was relieved to hear she was en route, but it stung deeply to learn she had flaked on our plans to hang out with Holly. I stared at my cell phone and furrowed my brow. “Did you know Becca was driving up here with Holly?” I asked Adam.
“Who?” he asked, feigning confusion.
“Your wife, wise-ass.” I smiled and rolled my eyes. I felt like we were fifteen and flirting again. He still managed to give me butterflies.
“Yeah, I think it was a last-minute thing, ’cause I didn’t know about it. Holly just called before I got to your house to say they were on their way up together. I think they went shopping or something. I figured you already knew.”
“It’s news to me,” I said, and shrugged. I couldn’t believe I was the last to know. Like an uncontrollable involuntary twitch, my trial-lawyer mind began to rapidly fire off questions like a machine gun: Why didn’t Becca simply tell me she was going shopping with Holly? What did she need at the last minute that warranted canceling our plans? Why did Nolan leave a message for Sal the night before, saying he and Becca might not make it up at all? Is Nolan now coming, too?
“You want a beer?” I asked, pulling two bottles from the fridge. I decided the dinner preparations could wait.
“Sure,” he said, and checked the label.
“It’s kosher. Don’t worry. I did my research.”
I watched as he looked for the small insignia of approval from a rabbinic authority that the ingredients were up to standards. He smiled broadly. “Wow. Thanks, J.” The uptick of my pulse upon hearing his former nickname for me was pathetic, even though I knew he had no idea how quickly my heart was beating.
“Are these yours?” Adam asked, with a hint of surprise, as he picked up a photograph of my kids.
“Yes, those are my sons, AJ and Matthew.”
“They are absolutely stunning!” He stared at the picture and then up at me. “They’re the South Asian version of you.”
I felt my cheeks flush. “Thank you. Yeah, they clearly got Lefkowitz hair and the Singh complexion.”
I took a swig of beer and stared at him. I am alone in my house with Adam. Adam! It was completely surreal—I actually pinched the inside of my bicep when I folded my arms. I had dreamed about this moment for years after our breakup. Decades later, here we were, both happily married and moved on, but the chemistry was still palpable. I wondered if he could feel it, too. “Come with me. I want to show you something,” I said, giving him an unnecessarily flirtatious wink.
I led him down to the basement, and when we reached the bottom of the stairs and turned the corner, he gasped. “Holy crap!”
I smiled in satisfaction. I still knew how to thrill him.
He was pointing at my sons’ drum set. “That’s a DW Collector’s Series twelve-piece set with Zildjian K custom twenty-two-inch cymbals,” he cried. He then dramatically reached his hands to the sky and tilted his head backward, as if he were praising God. “And it has the champagne sparkle finish!”
I laughed.
“That’s my dream set!” he said, “Everything is better in champagne sparkle, but this particular set in champagne sparkle is extraordinary.”
Adam had always been a frustrated musician. He had absolutely no natural rhythm, yet in high school he mimicked the gestures and swagger of rockers in the hopes that he could pass for one. He played in a garage band that was so bad, even his mother couldn’t fake compliments, but they managed to book gigs because all the guys were cute like Adam and never let ineptitude dismantle their confidence.
“One of my sons wanted lessons,” I explained. “We told him he couldn’t do it in our apartment because it would be too loud for the neighbors, so we promised he could play up here in the woods. We figured it might help scare away the bears.”
Adam remained transfixed. I doubted he’d even heard me.
“Of course! Actually, if you like, I can put on some music and you can jam. Okay?”
“Yeah! Bring it!” Adam said, as his fingers caressed the rim of the snare drum and gently flicked the symbols.
I tapped on an iPad installed in the basement’s wall, and a moment later the Red Hot Chili Peppers was blasting from built-in speakers in the ceiling. When we had constructed the house, two years earlier, I had objected to Sal’s turning our original vision for a simple log cabin into a state-of-the-art urban oasis in the country. And while I was certain that easily finding my high school boyfriend’s favorite band was not what my husband had in mind when he touted the convenience of having the latest technology at our fingertips, I could now see the benefits of certain amenities.
Adam grabbed the drumsticks and began banging away to the band’s classic “Give It Away.” Though his beat couldn’t have been further off, I held my beer in the air, belted out the lyrics, and shimmied around as if I were one of his groupies.
Shortly after I climbed atop our heavy-duty Ping Pong table, the music suddenly stopped, leaving Adam’s cymbal thrashing the only sound in the room. I suspected there was something wrong with the iPad, but when I turned toward the wall behind me, I found Becca and Holly standing there, mouths agape. They had turned the music off.
Touché, Holly, I thought. It took only twenty-something years. I may have been forty, but I still longed to heal the wound of having been jilted. I still yearned to have that fifteen-year-old boy love me back. I wasn’t going to ruin anyone’s marriage—mine or theirs—but I certainly enjoyed this glorious moment.
Adam looked over at his wife, a pregnant deer in headlights, and the drumsticks slipped from his fingers.
I jumped off the Ping-Pong table, spilling beer onto the beige Berber rug as I landed.
“We’re heeere,” Becca announced in a slow, reluctant singsong.
“Hol!” Adam said, hopping off the drum stool and briskly walking over to greet his wife like an obedient puppy. Had he possessed a tail, it would have been tucked between his legs.
In a split second, there I was, back at JFK airport at 5:00 a.m., getting dumped, once again, for Holly. I suddenly felt foolish and juvenile. “Hi, guys!” I said, and hugged my guests. “Holly! It’s splendid to see you after all these years!” “Splendid”? Where the hell did that come from? I couldn’t remember the last time I had used that word in a sentence. I suddenly felt nervous in my own home.
Both women smiled. I knew Becca’s was forced, but it had been eons since I’d spent time with Holly, so I couldn’t tell if hers was genuine.
“It’s good to see you, too,” she said, and immediately handed me a small, rectangular box with a red bow on top. “I know I mentioned it in an email, but really, it was so nice of you to include us. Thank you.”
“Oh, you didn’t need to bring anything.”
“It was the least I could do,” she said, and gently put her hand on my arm. “It’s just a few treats from the bakery.”
“Wonderful!” I squealed, a bit too loudly. Becca shot me a look that said, You all right?
Though a part of me would always hate Holly for stealing Adam and for being Becca’s backup best friend, I had to admit, it was surprisingly nice to see her. I had heard updates from Becca over the years about her success, but I had always been numb to the reports. Seeing her in person and hearing her voice again somehow softened me, and I was suddenly flooded with happy memories, not sour ones. What came to mind was not her betrayal or the passive competition I had always sensed between us, but playing with our Cabbage Patch Kids in her childhood bedroom and sitting next to her on the school bus, sniffing her red hair to see if it smelled sweet like Strawberry Shortcake’s auburn tresses.
“Adam, can I speak with you for a sec?” Holly asked, pointing toward the sectional couch at the far end of the room. “Just want to get business talk out of the way so it’s not on my mind,” she explained, turning back to me with a smile.
“Oh, no problem. I have some things to do upstairs anyhow.” Like shower, I thought.
I looked at Becca and motioned with my head, as if to say, Follow me up the steps.
“I’ve got to pee,” Becca said, and bolted to the bathroom.
When I got upstairs, I could faintly hear Holly and Adam’s conversation through the floor vent. I stepped closer to the grates to listen.
Unlike my prewar Manhattan apartment, where the rock-solid walls made each room feel like a soundproof recording studio, the bones of our country home were a bit calcium-deficient. Aesthetically, the house possessed the same clean lines yet unstuffy feel as our Upper East Side home. Both residences had the same crisp white kitchen cabinets and the same silver-plated picture frames that I bought in bulk from Bed Bath & Beyond. They even shared identical built-in white bookshelves that ran the length of the living room wall and were stuffed with paperbacks and an eclectic mix of colorful pottery. But somehow, despite my consistent style, the two-year-old wood-frame Cape felt hollow compared with the hearty construction of a Fifth Avenue classic six.
“Are you kidding me?” Holly whisper-shouted at him. I imagined him cowering. “Did you even make the bakery deliveries, or did you just drive directly to Jordana’s so you could watch your old girlfriend practically pole-dance on a Ping-Pong table before I got here?”
“Come on, you know that’s ridicu—”
“Oh, really?” She cut him off. “I don’t remember the last time I saw you drink a beer or play the drums!”
“Well,” he said gently, “first of all, to answer your question, yes, I made the bakery deliveries. Second, in terms of the beer, I drank it because she went out of her way to find a kosher brand, and I didn’t want to offend my host. I didn’t think it was polite to tell her that I prefer scotch. As for the drums, you haven’t heard me play because—and this may be news to you—we don’t own a drum set! Should I go on?”
“Please do,” Holly said. “And by the way, I’d be happy to buy you a drum set and a Ping-Pong table if you’d move to a house in the ’burbs. I’m just saying . . .”
Adam ignored her last comment. “I have said this before, and I’ll say it again.” His tone remained calm but firm. “I love you. I will always love you. I had no regrets then, I have no regrets now, and I will never regret choosing you over Jordana. She’s a wonderful person, but it ends there. I never loved her. Never.”
I felt breathless upon learning that the first boy ever to have professed his love for me—the one whose last name I used to affectionately doodle over and over as my own—had regarded me as nothing more than “a wonderful person.” Fuck him! And fuck her!
Holly sighed. “Okay. Fine. I just had to get it off my chest. I’m over it. I actually have more pressing stuff to discuss with you.” She sounded completely different, as if she had hit a reset button replacing her Fatal Attraction tone with one of concern.
For a few minutes, I heard nothing. They were no longer shouting, which was just as well because even if I had heard the sounds of their words, I would not have been able to process the meanings. I was fixated on the fact that he never loved me, despite the countless letters he’d written that proved otherwise. Standing there at the kitchen island, gripping the airtight cap of the expensive barbecue sauce I had ordered from an online kosher gourmet shop specifically for them, I fantasized that I had kept all those love letters and could shove them in their faces as evidence. I felt so betrayed and belittled knowing my love had been unrequited. It was the same sense of rejection I’d felt upon learning Becca had chosen to go shopping with Holly instead of driving up with me for the weekend I was creating in her honor. Could Holly squeeze me out of Becca’s life the way she squeezed me out of Adam’s? I wondered.
I must have taken my frustration out on the barbecue sauce, because, after several failed attempts at unscrewing
the lid, the jar slid from my hands, shattered glass everywhere, and splattered marinade all over my white backsplash.
“Dammit!” I muttered. “You’re acting like a child, not a forty-year-old woman, Jordana! Stop being so insecure.” I didn’t want anyone to hear me. But instead of immediately cleaning up the mess, which I would normally have done, I washed only my hands and then crouched down on the floor beside the air duct. When all I could make out were whispers, I tightened the messy bun atop my head, shut my eyes in concentration, and pressed my ear against the vent. Despite my best efforts, their hushed tones remained inaudible. I opened my eyes, and standing beside my face was a pair of bare feet—each toenail painted a different color and covered with sparkles. I knew immediately that the feet belonged to Becca—not only because of the high arches from her years of ballet, but because, other than I, she was the only person I knew who’d publicly display a pedicure given by a child.
“What on earth are you doing?” Becca asked, as she stared down at me.
“Oh, hey,” I said nonchalantly, as if attaching one’s ear to an air duct was perfectly normal. “I broke the barbecue sauce and was just picking up some of the glass.”
“With your eyes shut?” Becca stared at me skeptically. “Come on, you’re a better defense lawyer than that.”
Sighing, I stood up and massaged the vertical lines the metal grates had made on my cheek. I felt like an idiot.
“You were totally eavesdropping!” Becca poked my shoulder. “Admit it!”
“Fine! Guilty!” I said, rolling my eyes en route to the sink.
“So, what did you hear?” Becca asked.
“I couldn’t make out much.” I didn’t need to delve into some trivial conversation of how Adam had never loved me. Yeah, it was hurtful, but it didn’t sting nearly as much as knowing I was out of the loop of Becca’s life. I craved an understanding of what was going on with her and Nolan.
The Cast Page 12
