“Not today,” I hedged. Kate and I looked at each other. I said, “We had another errand.” The market would close in winter: Even now it was mainly apples and root vegetables, bunches of shallots and tough, faintly sweet greens with cold-weather heft and chew, thick ribs running down their centers. The vegetable piles on the tables around the capitol took on the knobby, russet feel of a grandparent’s house: everything serviceable and warming, the air smelling of the earth that clung to potatoes and onions and yams.
“Anything fun?” Jill asked absentmindedly.
“We’ll tell you all about it later,” Kate said.
“Cool.” Jill knotted her hair and skewered it with three sticks so they poked out from her hair like spokes on a wheel. She breathed deeply and said, “It’s so cozy here. I can see my breath in our apartment.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. I poured her a glass of the wine she’d brought. She rubbed her hands gleefully and breathed it in. “Are they trying to drive us out?”
“Why?” she said, swallowing a sip. “We never have those big bashes anymore. It’s been like four months since the landlord found Nate sleeping on top of your car.”
Kate chuckled and Jill turned to explain. “It was so late there was dew on the car and he thought it would be refreshing. He’s a total idiot. Come to think of it we haven’t seen him in a while. I barely even see Bec.”
“I’m sorry,” Kate said. “I monopolize her.”
Jill shook her head so vigorously I thought she’d dislodge one of her sticks. “Oh, I don’t mean that. I just meant our place is so much cleaner lately.”
When Lisa arrived, swooping in wearing a huge cape of some sort, we had a fire going and some music on. While she was greeting Kate, Jill sidled up to me where we stood at the counter, her slicing mushrooms and me chopping parsley. She murmured, “Liam called.”
“It’s twenty degrees out there!” Lisa cried. She took her cape off and threw herself in a chair next to Kate, running her fingers through her hair. “Winter is going to be a nightmare.”
“When?” I whispered.
“He called right before I left to come here,” Jill was saying. She moved a few slices to the edge of the cutting board with the blade of her knife. “He kind of tried to be chummy and ask what classes I was taking. He’s such a sleaze.” She watched my face and added, “Sorry.” I glanced over at Kate and Lisa.
“Is that a leather poncho?” Kate was asking. She nodded at the coat Lisa had laid on an empty chair. It looked like a deflated cow.
Lisa picked it up and held it against her. “You don’t like it? I thought it was original.”
I turned back to Jill. “He’s not a sleaze,” I muttered. “And what did he say, anyway?”
“It is original,” I heard Kate say. Lisa tossed the cape back over her chair. “You will definitely be the only one wearing it.”
I poked Jill again, but she was watching Kate speak, her brows slightly knit, unconsciously mouthing along as she tried to decipher it. I sighed and repeated, “ ‘Lisa will definitely be the only one wearing it.’ ” Jill smiled, but the joke lost something in the repetition. “Jill, what did he say?”
“Oh, he said he saw you somewhere or something and just wanted to say hello.”
That would be today. I hadn’t realized I was driving Kate through his neighborhood till it was too late. At least I had an excuse. If he saw me, he’d see Kate. I was just working. Stalking him was an unexpected bonus.
It had been almost a month since I had talked to him. There were days I thought he’d been a massive waste of time, others when I convinced myself he’d been a learning experience, and still others when it was clear to me that I would never feel about anyone the way I’d felt about him, and certainly I would never have sex again. I let Jill crow about how I had dumped him and how he’d had a Pygmalion complex and an early midlife crisis because she seemed so glad to do it, and because it sounded better than the reality. She was joking, slightly, but her version hurt anyway. It didn’t even matter that I knew she was wrong—he’d never tried to make me over. Was I really so hopeless that she thought I needed a guy to take me in hand?
Nevertheless I let her take me out a lot during those weeks. She was delighted and relieved to finally take part in this relationship in the proper best-friend way, by celebrating its demise in the form of comforting me. She was so upbeat that I began to think I really was well rid of him. Of course I was. But I felt raw inside, perpetually on the verge of either weeping or kissing a stranger.
I thought I saw him at every food cart, every corner, and every bench on campus—a glimpse of reddish hair across a collar, a battered brown leather bag—and it left me perpetually startled, darting glances about library mall like a robin. When I realized how close I really was that afternoon, a wash of prickling excitement had moved over me.
“He called to say hello? I don’t get that,” I said. “I never call to say hi. I call to say, Come over, I miss you, or I never officially won the argument about the Christmas card.”
“He just doesn’t want you to get over it,” Jill hissed. She finished the mushrooms and set the plate with a clunk on the counter next to me. They were ragged-looking—some thick and some paper-thin, with tags of mushroom skin hanging off their edges. “He wants to remind you in case you’ve forgotten one single thing.”
“Well, I haven’t.” I laughed a little and said, “He probably just misses me desperately.”
His wife had been in the driveway, getting out of the car. Maybe he’d been looking out the window. He was probably having twice as much sex with her now. She was probably reminding him of what a woman his own age could do. I minded her more now than I ever had before.
“Oh, right. Sure.” Jill gave a snort of laughter. She picked up a fork and began mixing a bowl of seasoned flour. She said to the flour, “Don’t call him.”
I reached over and took the bowl from her.
“I already mixed that,” I said shortly. “How about if you just slice the bread.”
She stood there, looking at me and holding the fork. Behind her Kate was saying something to Lisa and Lisa was repeating it, nodding to show she understood. Kate saw me look her way and gave me a quick smile.
It was supposed to be a fun night. I didn’t want to ruin it. What was I really going to get angry at her for? I had no moral high ground. I wasn’t above being petty, but I preferred to be able to hide it.
We sat down to dinner and passed the salad and wine. For a moment as I looked over the table I didn’t care about Liam or Jill hating him or any of it: We had a deep bowl filled with beef burgundy studded with translucent onions and soft carrots and mushrooms, a crisp green salad glistening with vinaigrette, butter softening in its blue dish. It was beautiful, and I’d made every bit of it. Well, except for baking the bread. I’d learn that next.
There was a pause while they waited to see who would toast and Kate and I exchanged glances. She nodded at me and I held up my glass. Jill and Lisa looked expectantly at us, their faces flushed from the warmth of the house. Jill’s ornamented sticks stuck up from behind her head like antennae. Her eyes shone brightly, and something about that pad of flesh that softened her square jaw and chin like a child’s, and the silliness of the hair ornaments, made me forgive her.
“To moving,” I translated. Kate spoke again and I repeated: “ ‘I’ve made a bid on a house.’ ”
A layer of silence dropped over us. She had told them she was house hunting, but I saw now that Lisa had assumed Kate was just amusing herself, fantasizing rather idly. Even I had thought so, and it may have been true, but the place we saw that morning was a small brick house that seemed like a cottage until you realized how far back the rooms extended. It had window boxes and working shutters, two bedrooms and a study and a nice, though small, kitchen. The kitchen would expand: Kate had cast an appraising look at the wall that separated it from the front room, and I knew it would be knocked out if she had anything to say about it.
Kate maintained that most houses had at least two walls too many.
Jill broke the quiet with a little cheer and we drank. I swirled my glass beneath Kate’s nose so she could smell it. Lisa took a sustained sip, her long throat working, and set her glass down carefully on the red tablecloth. After a moment she said, “Congratulations, Katie. You’ll have a lot of fun getting it ready.” She kept on that way through dinner, asking questions and mentioning curtains and paint, but I had seen a look flicker across her face.
Kate and I looked at each other. I’d been hoping her friends were supporting this all along, even though I loved her house and wasn’t looking forward to moving her either. Yet as soon as I saw Lisa’s expression I had the cantankerous urge to contradict her. If Kate wanted to move, she was moving. My job was just to help make it easy.
HELEN ARRIVED AT NINE, bearing a chocolate cake. I took a little of its frosting on the edge of a spoon and put it in Kate’s mouth to melt on her tongue.
“Are you going to tell Helen?” I whispered. I took the smeared spoon from her mouth. Kate looked meaningfully through the kitchen door to Lisa and Helen, who were curled up on opposite ends of the couch by the fire. Jill was sitting cross-legged in a big easy chair, a coffee cup balanced on one blue-jeaned knee.
“I don’t know,” Kate sighed. Annoyance crossed her face and she said, “Lisa was pretty lukewarm.”
“You think so?” I asked. I was hoping she hadn’t noticed, or I’d misinterpreted. “I thought she seemed happy for you.”
Kate wasn’t buying it. “You saw the look,” she reminded me.
“Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe she thought the beef was tough.”
I put slices of cake on plates and brought them in. I could see Lisa’s and Helen’s heads together, Jill listening to them intently. Helen’s eyebrows were raised so high they disappeared beneath the flat fringe of her bangs. She turned to us as we entered the room, her fingers resting on her collarbone, and said, “Kate, really?”
I was walking behind Kate, so I couldn’t see her expression, but I could guess at it: the steely one—chin lifted, eyelids lowered almost imperceptibly—which she often wore while she was on the phone with her mother, saying, No, I don’t need any money. Tell Dad I’m fine.
I moved around in front of Kate so I could translate for Helen when Kate replied, “Yeah. It’s on Chambers Street.”
“I just didn’t think you were . . . at that point,” Helen said delicately. She sipped her coffee and shook her head at the cake I offered her. I set it down on the table in front of her.
Kate stopped her chair in front of the fire. She said something, but I couldn’t understand her when her face was backlit. I turned on the lamp and she spoke again. “He knows what I want,” she said slowly. “And I know what he wants. And we aren’t making any progress.” She paused after each statement, looking back and forth at Helen and at Lisa, and let me repeat it. “There are things I can’t count on him for.”
Lisa took a bite of cake and chewed, staring down at her plate. “Are you sure you’re not doing something really impulsive just to show Evan you aren’t paralyzed?”
Kate laughed. Lisa blushed. “Emotionally paralyzed,” she corrected herself, smiling thinly. “You know what I’m saying. It’s such a big thing to ditch a marriage.”
“Why are you saying this to me?” Kate asked. Her eyebrows were knit, her head tilted incredulously.
“ ‘Why are you saying this to me?’ ” I repeated. It came out sounding flat and odd, as though I were reading from a cue card. I shot her a look of apology, but she didn’t notice. Lisa glared into the fire. Helen picked up her plate, took a miniscule bite of cake, and set it back down. I wished I could have crossed Kate’s arms for her; she looked as if that was what she would have liked to do right then. Pointlessly, I crossed my own.
“Chambers Street is one of my favorite streets in Madison,” Jill announced.
AFTER JILL AND HELEN left, I got Kate to bed and left her with Lisa while I did the dishes. When I left them Lisa was sitting in a chair next to the bed with her stockinged feet up on the mattress, Kate’s face turned toward her. Around eleven Lisa came back out and got her cape from the back of the chair where she’d left it. She stood there for a second in the doorway to the kitchen, hefting the leather lightly with one hand, as though she were testing its weight, and then she said, “So how do you like this new house?”
I turned around and faced her, drying my hands on a towel. “It’s very cozy,” I said. “And it’ll be beautiful. She’s really going to make it over.”
Lisa nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t act as enthusiastically as I could have,” she began.
“You don’t have to apologize to me.”
“I know. I’ve been hoping she and Evan could work this out, though, and this just feels like the ax falling.”
“Have you said that to Evan?” I asked.
She lifted her hands and dropped them to the tabletop. “Yeah,” she admitted. “I’m not making excuses for him. But I’ve seen this Cynthia woman. She’s just a replacement.”
“Obviously.”
“No, I mean she’s very much like Kate.”
“But that’s worse!” I glanced toward the back of the house and lowered my voice. “Kate’s not exactly gone. He’s trying to replace her and she’s still here. You know, when I think that we used to sit around here and have a really good time together—and we did; they were fun—and he was saying he was going to the store or something and really going off . . . it just, it humiliates me that I believed him. I know it’s dumb; it wasn’t my marriage.” It was a huge relief to say this. Maybe I had had too much wine, but it had always bothered me, to be so close to them, in proximity, anyway, and to have misunderstood or missed the biggest undercurrents. It was humiliating to have been so clueless, especially when I’d thought I was picking up on everything.
Lisa was watching me, expressionless. “You didn’t know them years ago,” she said, as if that explained it all. “For a while I was living with this professor and the four of us were together all the time. We went on vacations; we rented beach houses. I really thought all of us could have bought a house and lived together till we got old and feeble, that’s how close we were.”
I didn’t see the point. “So what happened?”
“The guy and I broke up, Kate got sick . . .” She stood up and put her poncho on. “There’s no moral or anything. I miss it, is all. I want her to be happy and if a new house does it, fine.” She paused, chewing her lower lip. “I’ve known her for almost twenty years. I love her more than my own family. But I worry about how fast she’s moving. She doesn’t like waiting for people to catch up, you know? It’s not like I don’t understand why. Evan has a hard time with change in general, but especially with the ALS. It took him forever just to accept what was happening to her, and she didn’t have the luxury of kidding herself like he did. He was way behind the acceptance curve, you know? Talking about orthopedic shoes when she was trying to write a will. I don’t think she’s ever forgotten having to prop him up.”
She rubbed her eyes and sighed, leaning back against the wall. “You really can’t imagine how strange those first several months were, especially. Your default mode when your best friend tells you she’s trembling all the time is that it’s nothing. I said it would be nothing so many times I felt guilty when it was something, like I deceived her. And it moved really fast. It wasn’t like these last few months. We kept trying to do things, you know—plan to walk downtown, try to handle the stairs at Le Champignon. We just didn’t get it; we didn’t get that this stuff was over and done with. She had to keep telling us it was.”
LIAM CALLED ONE MORE time, later that week. I was at home, flipping through a magazine. I was stretched out on my stomach on the couch, the phone on the floor next to me. I remember touching the receiver, the vibration ringing through my hand. When his voice came on the answering machine I felt a charge go right through me, a flash of heat range over my ski
n. Two calls in one week. Maybe he really did have something to say. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to end everything.
“Hi, Bec,” he said to the machine. “It’s been a while. I thought we could catch up. Just to talk. Nothing, um . . . nothing else.”
There was a long pause, while I listened to the staticky answering-machine tape running in the living room. My hand was still on the phone. I thought, He is right there.
“Coffee, maybe,” he continued. “Or lunch, if you want. It seems really odd not to be talking to you these days, that’s all.”
I almost picked up the phone. What could coffee hurt? I started to pick up the receiver and it made a loud clicking noise over the machine. But then I put it back.
Liam sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re right, I know. Don’t pick up.”
nine
WE WERE GOING TO have the windows, doorways, and shower widened in the new house. Kate also made plans to tear down a kitchen wall and add ramps to the front door and off the back porch. I had to learn a whole new set of terms when talking to the architect. She gave me a book to read so I would understand her when she said words like “load-bearing.” Our conversation was filled with references to treatments and fabrics and weird objects: swags, sconces, andirons.
After a while I would have simply closed my eyes and pointed, and if I ended up with celadon instead of sage, I probably wouldn’t even know. I blamed my upbringing. My own mother’s decorating had consisted of replacing the carpet each time I made the final, irreparable spill and sticking with wire-haired dogs that didn’t shed. But Kate could file away every visual permutation, recalling each gradation of flame into scarlet, navy into indigo. (The names of the various hues turned out to have oddly political leanings: Many of the reds, for instance, referred obliquely or directly to Russia or China. I hoped against hope to encounter a true Commie Red.)
I had never had the urge to paint a room in my life until one day I saw a gallon of saffron and went for it, and now my bedroom walls glowed cozily. Kate gave me one of her copper pans, a little shallow one for omelets, and I kept it in my room, where it reflected the burnish of the saffron paint, and where Jill knew it was off-limits.
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