Janice parks her SUV in the side lot, already filled with the cars of the morning golfers, and walks out toward the tennis courts. The pock-pock-pock of tennis balls bouncing off clay echoes across the grounds, but when Janice arrives down at the courts Beverly is nowhere to be seen. Janice waits for her at the edge of the courts and watches Linda Franks rally with Martha Grouper. Back and forth the ball sails, and Janice averts her eyes from the women’s frantic lunges, wondering if she looks as stiff as they do when she plunges after a ball. Ever since she pulled a ligament in her elbow in the spring tournament, she’s grown more aware of her age, of the vague creaking in her joints and the slowness of her muscles to fire.
Martha finally sends Linda flying backward in pursuit of a perfectly sliced backhand, then walks over to the low fence and leans toward Janice, gesturing her in close. Horizontal sweat lines dampen the yellow knit of Martha’s tank top, marking the exact location of the folds of her stomach. Janice unconsciously touches her own belly, which is definitely pushing against her waistband but has not yet succumbed to gravity in the way that her rear end and hips have. Fifty is looming, just a year off now, and she sometimes thinks she can see her looks falling away by the day. Men don’t stare at her on the street anymore, the way they used to. Worse, she and Paul haven’t had sex in six months, and although he’s been overwhelmed by the IPO and she hasn’t felt much of a sex drive herself, she can’t help but worry that he has stopped desiring her altogether. Tonight, she thinks. Tonight she will initiate it.
“I bet you’re in a good mood today,” Martha says, pushing up her visor and dropping her sunglasses down so that she can peer directly into Janice’s eyes. “It’s all over the news. They’re saying you’ve gone Forbes 400—what, trillionaires?”
The number, Janice has already calculated in her head, is actually around $300 million—it is surreal to even summon up the figure—but she wouldn’t dare tell Martha that. Still, she can’t quite prevent the grin of embarrassed pleasure that pinches her face. “Oh, please. We both know it’s just numbers on paper. Stock options are just accounting figures, not actual money.” Yet, she thinks.
“What on earth does a person do with so much money?” Martha marvels, as though it’s an utter mystery to her, despite the fact that Janice knows that Martha’s husband, Steven, a venture capitalist specializing in wireless technology, has already made his own fortune. (Their vacation home in Aspen has eight—eight!—bedrooms.) Nonetheless, Martha’s question has crossed Janice’s mind many times lately. Not that the Millers need much, but suddenly they have been catapulted into that upper strata of Santa Rita society that can have anything it wants. What Janice has told no one—not Paul, not even Margaret, the one person who she thinks might appreciate this—is that when she imagines what she might afford now, the only thing she truly covets is art. A painting. Specifically (and yes, it’s ludicrous, but…) she covets a van Gogh, one like those she saw a few years back when they last visited France. Janice had spent a rainy day at the Louvre by herself—Paul was back at the hotel taking business calls—and had felt a curious sense of liberation as she walked the great halls alone, addressing the stoic museum guards in her somewhat rusty French. Egyptian antiquities, Greek sculpture, Italian Renaissance, Impressionism: She took in each one in order, spending no more than ten minutes in each room, making sure not to skip the smaller galleries, carefully noting every important piece. She wanted to absorb it all, methodically, sequentially. But when she got to the van Gogh exhibition she came to a dead stop. She had seen photos of his work before and found them interesting, but this—the paintings themselves—was something else entirely. The violence of the paint applied in furious layers so thick that she could see the impressions of the artist’s fingers, clawing at the canvas—she felt like she’d been slapped. The color! As vivid as a hallucination. There was something wild and abandoned in that gallery, and she stood there, trembling, unable to leave the room for well over an hour. She never made it to see the Dutch Masters.
She imagines one of those paintings hanging over the mantel in her living room and shivers at the thought of what it might let into her home. Not that they could (or should) buy an $80 million painting. Still, they could start with a minor drawing—like the landscape study she earmarked in the Sotheby’s catalog last month—and work their way toward a collection. They could become patrons of the arts, even start a foundation, and she could take guided tours across Europe to really cultivate a discerning eye. She envisions paintings in the de Young Museum limned by placards boasting From the Collection of Paul and Janice Miller. A suitable title for a generous life, well-lived.
Regardless, the truth is that what she might buy with all that money sometimes feels besides the point; mostly she just likes to think of this money as a safety net, vast and tightly woven, a guarantee that from this point on everything will be okay. Her children will never have to worry about money, ever; they will never suffer the gnawing panic of wondering where the rent will come from, the way she once did.
Everyone always says that the early years of struggle are the happiest, but Janice knows better than that. A photograph in an old album of hers shows Paul in the tiny peeling bathroom of their very first apartment, the one above the dry cleaners in San Francisco that smelled like mold, extending his fingertips so that he is touching both walls; the grin on his face says, “Look at me, slumming it!” But Janice remembers taking that photograph and thinking, He has no idea, even as she laughed along with him. Because in the morning, he would leave for his job and she would be alone in that depressingly familiar apartment with Margaret, a fussy and demanding baby even if she was the first of their friends’ children to toddle and talk, and that sense of shared adventure would dissipate. She battled an oblique discontent, a sense that she had run up against a wall without any doors, and even though she had every reason in the world to love where she was—beautiful baby! charming husband! a whole apartment of her own to work on!—somehow she didn’t feel satisfied. Perhaps it was just the couch? If they could just get rid of that avocado plaid Sears couch and get a nice leather one? The miscarriages came, then, one after another, like a punishment; and Paul began to work longer and longer hours, pulling himself rung by rung up the corporate ladder, a snappish companion even when he was home to admire the secondhand side table she’d spent all day decoupaging. It wasn’t until later—when they’d bought their first house, had some money to spend and room to breathe, gave up on a second child—that she discovered a sense of peace. Janice can remember a morning, their ninth anniversary, when they went up in a hot air balloon over the Napa Valley, on an obscenely expensive whim, and she looked over at her husband and realized that his eyes were bright with excitement and free of worry, and he looked back at her and laughed and she felt like they’d seen each other for the first time in years. Napa Valley unfolded below them, a blanket of green vines planted in reassuring geometric rows, and farther out was the ocean, where they could see the clouds rolling in, but where they floated the sun was hot and the sky clear. Janice remembers thinking then that they’d made it through the worst years and now they were being lifted up, lifted like the balloon, and feeling pure joy. When had that feeling waned? Sometime after Lizzie was born, she thinks, once Paul was swept up in the technology boom, once Margaret had abandoned them for another life. Maybe it’s time to plan another trip to Napa, another balloon ride.
Janice checks her watch as Martha and Linda finish their game. It’s nine-thirty, and Beverly is a half hour late, which is so unlike her—Beverly, like Janice, is of the school that believes that promptness is a sign of respect—and when Janice finally calls her at home to see whether she forgot, no one answers. Perhaps there’s been an emergency with her son, Mark? Janice feels a vague sense of anxiety, a slight pull in the fabric of her morning. She waits fifteen more minutes, trying Beverly’s cell phone, too, and then gives up altogether. As she walks back up to the car she struggles to remember another time when Beverly failed to appear
for a date and can’t recall a single incident.
The loss of her morning game throws Janice’s plans off and she arrives back in downtown Santa Rita half an hour before her hair appointment, annoyed at the upheaval of her meticulous schedule. To kill time, she picks up a box of truffles at the patisserie—cardamom and black pepper chocolates for him, violet and rose petal creams for her, and walnut-cinnamon for Lizzie—and a $150 bottle of Dom Pérignon that the gentleman at the wine cellar describes as “transcendent” (blatant hyperbole on his part, perhaps, but she is compelled nonetheless). She leaves both in the car, worried that they’ll melt and spoil, while she goes to have Peggy doctor her graying roots back to their original blond.
Janice reclines in the salon chair, finding it difficult to lose a tension that’s settled in between her shoulder blades (excitement? anxiety? she can’t tell), while Peggy—who seems out of sorts this morning, her eyes puffy and her responses terse—slaps the stinging peroxide on Janice’s scalp. By the time her hair is blown out and coaxed into submission around her shoulders, Janice can tell that the color is a little too brassy this time, a shade too yellow—the color, she thinks, of a woman trying to cling to youth, rather than of one aging with grace. Peggy watches her staring at herself in the mirror, and Janice forces a smile. “Thank you,” she says. “It’s lovely.” She will not let this ruin her day, she decides, and when it comes time to pay the bill, she impulsively adds a $100 tip—a little something to improve Peggy’s spirits. Besides, if today isn’t the day for frivolous generosity, when is?
As she leaves the salon, she checks her cell phone and is frustrated that there is still no message from Paul. The stock market won’t close for another hour, though, and it’s probably too much to expect him to call before then. Janice tucks the phone in her bag and shoulders on to the grocery store, where they have no Cornish game hens at all, the ahi looks mangy, and the cantaloupe that she needs for her melon puffs is completely unripe. As she stands in the produce aisle, morosely contemplating the rock-hard melons, Cecile Bellstrom clips by in her jogging suit, a quart of orange juice in her hands. “Janice!” Cecile exclaims. She pauses, and then bursts out: “Okay, I just can’t stand here and pretend that I don’t know, but of course I do, I saw the news just like everyone else, so I just wanted to say congratulations! Couldn’t happen to a nicer family!”
This lifts Janice back up, out of her strange slump, and she bounds off toward the florist, where she picks up an armful of stargazer lilies for the dinner table. On the way back to her car she spies Noreen Gossett, who just last weekend had been in a golf foursome with her and Beverly—their daughters are in the same class, although Noreen’s rather self-entitled daughter, Susan, has never shown the slightest bit of interest in Lizzie—and she perks up in anticipation of yet another flattering conversation. But instead of coming over to say hello, Noreen twitches and then jerks sideways as if someone had seized her shoulders, veering off without even a wave.
Janice comes to a halt, seized by confusion. She can feel the heat radiating off the parked cars around her as they bake in the midday sun. What could she have done to offend Noreen? Is something wrong? She has a sudden flash of understanding that the news of the Miller family’s new fortune will not be taken well by everyone and that she is not the only person in town who’s ever suffered a twist of jealousy at her neighbor’s successes. But maybe it’s just that Noreen didn’t see her after all, Janice tries to reassure herself. She restlessly pulls out her cell phone and checks it again—ten to one, the stock market closing any minute—before continuing on toward the tailor.
The tailor is two blocks up Centerview Avenue, and Janice glimpses herself in every window she walks past: the organic Italian deli (yes, the hair is definitely too yellow), a real estate agency whose plate glass is hidden underneath photographs of Beaux Arts estates (her tennis skirt is exposing far too much cellulite), and the shop that sells four hundred kinds of artisanal soap (has her chin always had that wobble in it?). A throng of teenagers slump over the wrought-iron sidewalk tables outside the Fountain, eating French fries; the expressions of ennui on their faces suggest that summer, only a week in, has already become a chore. Janice smiles at them as she passes, trying to recall if she knows any of their parents, but they gaze at her without interest. The traffic on the street has picked up—it’s the lunchtime rush—and someone is honking persistently, slamming down on their horn over and over.
At the tailor shop, the owner, an efficient elderly Chinese lady named Mrs. Chen—her fingers, Janice often tells her friends, move as quickly as hummingbirds—sits hunched over a suit, framed by plastic garment bags hanging on the rack behind her. Janice’s own dress, a dark blue Calvin Klein sheath that she had to purchase slightly too large in the chest in order to fit over her hips, is already waiting for her by the cash register, and she tries it on behind the faded curtain that serves as a dressing room. The minute Janice pulls the dress over her head, she knows something is wrong: It wedges at her armpits, with her arms trapped helplessly in the fabric, and refuses to go farther.
“I think you took it in too much,” she calls.
Mrs. Chen peeks around the curtain, seemingly unperturbed by the sight of Janice in tennis panties and a jog bra. She tugs firmly down on the dress, and there’s a sound of popping thread. “You too big,” Mrs. Chen observes mildly, yanking the garment back over Janice’s head.
Janice picks up her tennis shirt to shield her nakedness. “You measured me,” she complains. “I certainly haven’t changed sizes in the last week.”
Mrs. Chen examines the seams of the dress and picks at the zipper. “No worry, I can fix,” she says. “You come back next week.” Janice looks down at the dress—feels the image of herself as the stylish and still-attractive wife effortlessly serving her family a gourmet meal fading away—and is taken aback when tears well up in her eyes. She blinks them back before Mrs. Chen can see them. It’s just a dress, she reminds herself; just a bad haircut, a missed game, an unripe melon.
“Fine,” she says. “It’s not a problem.”
As she returns through the sheltering oaks toward her house—the car radio, tuned to the news, announces that the Nasdaq has closed up thirteen points but mentions nothing about Paul’s company—Janice goes back over her day. She senses that things have shifted out of alignment, like a house that’s slipped off its foundation; trying to identify the origin of this feeling, she fixes on Beverly once more. Something was definitely wrong this morning—it’s not like Beverly not to call—and she is suddenly overwhelmed with a rush of concern for her friend. Maybe, she thinks, if I just sort that out, everything else will fall back into line. When she reaches the edge of town, instead of turning toward her house, she impulsively turns right, toward Beverly’s.
The Weatherloves live in a two-story Tudor with a shake roof and green shutters. The Fourth of July is still a week away, but Beverly has already hung up bunting and a flag and planted red and white impatiens in the flower beds by the front door. Beverly’s BMW is not in the driveway. Janice rings the doorbell, peering through the front window into the dim living room, but sees no sign of life. She can hear footsteps echoing through the hallway, though, bare feet thudding along the wood floors toward the door.
When the door swings open, Beverly’s teenage son, Mark, stands there, sullen and silent, his hooded sweatshirt yanked over his head despite the heat, his eyes bloodshot, his mottled skin angrily mapping every red pimple.
“Hello, Mark. Is your mother here?” Janice asks.
“No,” he says. His voice is nasal and stuffy—has he been crying?
“Where is she?”
“She’s gone,” he says, which elucidates nothing at all. Janice stands looking at him dumbly, pondering that word: Gone? Gone where? Gone to the grocery store? Gone away? She looks at the boy—he’s definitely been crying, and despite her general alarm she feels a stab of tenderness for the dour child.
“Mark, is everything okay?” She steps toward
him, her hand half-lifted, tugged by a desire to pull him into her bosom. But Mark shrugs and punches the door slightly toward her, as if to block her way.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Thanks. I’ll let her know you were here.” And then he closes the door, leaving Janice baffled on his front steps. There is nothing for her to do but go back home and hope that she’s making something out of nothing. A forgotten date, a crying kid—it could be anything and nothing at all. But she remembers a confession Beverly made a few months back, after a couple of Bloody Marys in the club lounge, about how her relationship with Louis had been strained for some time, and she can’t help but wonder now if Louis has left her. If she doesn’t hear back from Beverly by the morning, Janice decides, she’ll come marching back and sit on her friend’s doorstep until Beverly tells her what’s wrong.
She pulls into her own driveway just after two and sits in her car for a moment, gazing up at her house. They painted it a pale yellow several years back, the color of a cashmere sweater, and the house seems to glow in the afternoon sun. It’s a graceful, regal building, in a classic Georgian Colonial architectural style, with manicured hedges and pilasters framing the front entrance and ivy creeping up the siding, a house that makes her feel like she’s a part of some great American tradition. Looking at it, she experiences relief, as if she’s ridden out a small squall and has arrived back in a safe port.
But inside, the house is too quiet. The answering machine is silent: no messages. Janice’s breath is loud in the empty kitchen as she puts away the groceries and the champagne, echoing off the stainless steel appliances, the Calphalon pans hanging above the kitchen island on their custom-designed iron rack, the yellow-veined granite counters. In the back garden, James, her new pool boy, has arrived for his biweekly visit. He pushes his net slowly against the current of the water, lifts a single leaf, swings the pole to the side of the pool, and taps the net to deposit the leaf on an accumulating pile of soggy greenery. Janice watches him from the kitchen window. When he looks up, she waves at him, and he lifts a hand and smiles. A worm of sweat rolls down his brow as he upends a jug of chlorine into the deep end.
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything Page 2
