Best Intentions (3 page)

I head south on Lexington Avenue, maneuvering around people hurrying to the subway, women wheeling double strollers, deliverymen with beefy tattooed forearms already glistening with sweat. I've loved walking the city streets from my very first summer here, when, exhilarated by the initial rush of independence, I would stroll home at all hours of the night, past bars spewing out people, outdoor cafés closing up, unafraid, free, every neighborhood a revelation, every man a potential lover. Sam and I had broken up—after endless nights of red wine and Marlboros, that's how long ago it was—three weeks before graduation, and I knew that somewhere in the city he, too, was walking the streets, perhaps eating in the same restaurants. I could feel him sometimes just around a corner, though by chance or design we never actually bumped into each other.

I thought of him more often than I cared to admit. It had been so easy at first between us. It seemed to be always fall then, the sloppy, cozy messiness, the warmth of our hands sliding beneath sweaters as we lay together on dank campus lawns, the musty smell of books as we sat in the library, our legs sneaking up against each other until neither of us could see the words, make sense of anything but each other, late nights spent confiding the nooks and crannies of our lives, skin, most of all skin, discovering the curves of my own body beneath his touch so that later, alone, I would retrace his path with my fingertips. I had made love with only one boy before—and that was not borne out of passion, but simply my desire not to be a virgin when I went to college—so in every way that mattered Sam was my first. We were both so porous, so unguarded in our love. Maybe that can truly happen only once, that unbruised optimism, that total lack of reserve or doubt. I still have, someplace, the notes he used to slip in my backpack, under my door, in my coat pocket when I wasn't
looking, adorning them with quirky little line drawings and proclamations of love, unembarrassed, fearless. It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

Sometimes in the beginning, we would lie in whatever narrow dorm bed we could appropriate and indulge in a luxurious worry about that very ease, wondering if it—we—could be real. But we were just playing with the concern from the self-congratulatory distance of requited love, deep down we believed we were invulnerable. After almost two years together, though, we both began to test, to stretch the skin of our bond. Because it was the only serious relationship either of us had been in, it was normal, I suppose, for some curiosity to fester, if only so we could reassure ourselves that we truly did belong together. But trying to prove a negative when it comes to love is a dangerous proposition. In London for a semester during my senior year (which, thankfully, my scholarship covered) I made the mistake of sharing a snippet of uncertainty in a letter to Sam, whose response was to embark on a brief and, he later insisted, thoroughly meaningless affair.

When I returned, there were teary confessions, though Sam refused to tell me who the girl was other than that she was a junior majoring in philosophy, of all ridiculous things. For years I've pictured a spindly, neurasthenic girl in a moth-eaten sweater talking about Kierkegaard while she fucked my future husband. I admitted to a single night with a Moroccan exchange student I met in a Muswell Hill pub. (In fact, I had run out on him before anything really happened, but I was angry with Sam and wanted to even the score.) In the end, we decided to forgive each other's transgressions and pick up where we left off, but it wasn't that simple. The difference between what we had been and what we were now, flawed, suspicious, resentful, proved too jarring. We moved to Manhattan within weeks of each other, but by then we were no longer speaking.

Within a couple of years, I grew weary of the single life, trying on personalities, trying on men, the bass player in an eighties band making an all-too-brief comeback, the corporate lawyer who taught me to play poker with his friends but pouted like a spoiled two-year-
old when he lost, the restaurant owner who brought me massive amounts of leftover food every night that I threw out as soon as he left—no one seemed to fit. What had at first seemed a landscape of infinite possibility came to feel aimless and disorienting. The city constantly shape-shifted around me; there were so many potential groups of friends, alliances, neighborhoods, so many people you could be. Deirdre was better at it than I was. After a cataclysmic breakup with Jack when she refused to move to Cambridge with him no matter how much he reasoned, pleaded, banged on her door in the middle of the night with entreaties and threats, she reveled in the freedom. But I missed a sense of belonging to a person, a place. Most of all I missed Sam—the way he cupped my hip bone in the palm of his hand, the esoteric quotes he used to send me, the calm solidity he possessed that allowed me to relax in a way I never could with anyone else, the feeling of being known, truly known. When I ran into him at a party given by a mutual friend on a frigid December night—okay, actually I had asked my friend to be sure to invite him—it was like landing on familiar ground. He phoned the next morning. He, too, had come to think of our separation as a rebuke that had outlived its purpose. He refers to it now as our “period of exile” when he tells the story to friends, to our children. How foolish we were, everyone agrees, smiling because there was, after all, a happy ending.

We were married within the year.

We moved into a cheap studio apartment in Chelsea with a slanted splintery wooden floor that mocked us whenever we went barefoot and furnished it with pieces we picked up at thrift shops and the local flea market. I loved watching Sam on Sunday afternoons bare-chested in his tattered khaki shorts sanding away—his ability to refinish furniture a revelation to me—the radio blaring, his broad back, his muscles and his shoulder blades all the more erotic because he was truly mine. Even now, all these years later, a reverberation of that early desire passes through us both whenever we walk by that block and remember that compressed time when it was just us and we had so much to look forward to.

“Can we make it six thirty?” she said. “Same place.”

I turn up Forty-second Street and weave through a parade of women dressed as if from different hemispheres; some are wearing summer outfits that are not quite as fresh as they had been in June, others have impatiently pulled out their new fall clothes and are already trying to hide the inevitable wilting.

When I first moved to Manhattan I studied other women's habits of dress, of grooming, of speech and manners as closely as an anthropologist, anxious to pass as one of them. It was all I had dreamed of, coming here. Now, years later, I know that I do, most days, anyway—my hair is cut in a studio on lower Fifth Avenue favored by beauty editors, though I stretch out appointments for too many months, I know that pleated pants are the devil's handiwork and if, at thirty-nine, I am endlessly battling the same five pounds, it is never more than that (well, rarely)—but I am constantly aware of the effort it takes. I sometimes wonder if everyone else in the city is passing, too.

I used to think I could tell who was, who wasn't.

But I am beginning to think that I was wrong.

I
walk into the pseudo-French bistro across from Grand Central Terminal and scan the room crowded with men and women hunched over their croissants and their spreadsheets, looking for Deirdre. I finally spot her in a back booth, her head turned away from me to avoid the flash of annoyance she knows she will find on my face. Either that or she is so immersed in Ben she has forgotten all about my arrival.

I watch them pry reluctantly apart when they notice me, peeling inch by inch off of each other as if their skin is covered with duct tape. They both smile a little too enthusiastically as I approach. Ben's presence is breaking an unwritten rule barring intruders from our breakfasts. Under the best of circumstances it would make me feel slightly dispossessed. And I wouldn't exactly call this morning the best of circumstances.

I bend over, kiss them both hello, Deirdre's dusky Creed perfume, at once familiar and exotic, filling my nostrils, and sit down opposite them.

“Don't worry, I'm not staying,” Ben says lightly. “I just came for a quick cup of coffee.” His face is slightly ruddy, his angular features just asymmetrical enough to make his good looks intriguing, open to interpretation. At forty-one, he is lean and muscular—he still rides a bike everywhere he goes.

“Don't be silly. How have you been?” I ask casually. I haven't seen Ben since last spring, when Deirdre broke it off with him. In fact, Deirdre and Ben have broken up and gotten back together so many times over the past two years, their desire for each other chronic and insoluble, that I no longer believe in either state and thus refrain from offering judgment or encouragement. A photographer, Ben flies all over the country on assignment, often disappearing for days at a time with no word, a nomadic man with a nomadic heart. Famous for his black-and-white portraits that highlight every line, every pore, every sorrow and vanity, he is a master at exposing a subject's innermost self while maintaining a formal aloofness. The juxtaposition is his trademark, a lure to everyone who thinks he can conquer it, win him over, everyone who thinks he will be the exception.

“I've been great,” he says. “Busy. Traveling too much, but that's nothing new. How about you?”

Before I can answer, Deirdre rushes in. “Did you see Ben's portrait of Branson in yesterday's magazine section?” she asks, anxious to score points for him.

He smiles at her indulgently, too confident in his own talent to need her public praise, but basking in it nonetheless.

“Yes.” I vaguely recall glancing at the full-page image of the mogul's stark, aging face. It was certainly not what I would call a flattering image. “I can't imagine he loved that picture,” I remark. This is not at all how I thought this breakfast would go and it is hard to shift gears.

“Maybe not,” Ben replies, pushing his auburn hair off his high forehead. “Most people are too embarrassed to admit that what they really expect is an airbrushed version of themselves. Then again, I don't think they quite know which is the more accurate reflection, the one they see in the mirror or the one they are confronted with in black and white.” While he speaks, Deirdre leans into him with the eagerness of one who cannot take possession for granted. Some part of their bodies has been touching since I sat down, their hips, their elbows; I cannot see their legs beneath the table but I am sure they
are intertwined, in play. It's hard not to feel extraneous around them, as if you are simply a dull and distant background, a bas-relief to highlight their intransigent attraction.

“I'm always surprised people agree to sit for you. I don't think I want to see myself that clearly. I need a little bit of denial to get out the door.”

“It's a mixture of curiosity and conceit. Most of the people I photograph are used to being in control. They assume they'll be able to exhibit only the public version they want seen. But it's actually harder than they realize to hide your true nature. I just have to be patient. The trick is to offer up a little piece of yourself and wait for them to respond in kind.”

“So it's an act of calculated confession. Don't they feel betrayed?”

“It's been said all journalism is seduction and betrayal. I'm sure Sam would agree. Photography isn't all that different. My responsibility is to the finished product, not to the subject. Only second-raters and sentimentalists get the two confused. The other person knows the game going into it. If they choose to pretend otherwise it's not my fault.” Ben talks the way he photographs, observing everything from a distance. He was on the debate team at Yale, he likes the give-and-take. Sometimes I think he takes a contentious position just to keep things crackling. Then again, I find him awfully hard to read. Perhaps he believes everything he says.

“That's rather cynical,” I remark.

“It's just how it works,” Ben says. “All relationships are based on a deal. Sometimes it's verbalized, sometimes it's not, but it's always there.”

Deirdre rolls and unrolls the corners of her napkin, hyperalert to his words.

He smiles. “I'm sure you two have far more interesting things to discuss than the sordid workings of photography. Deirdre made it quite clear that I was supposed to leave right after hello. Say hi to Sam for me.”

“I will.”

Ben rises and leans over to kiss Deirdre good-bye, lingering on her lips. I jiggle my spoon between my fingers, uncertain where to look.

Eventually, they separate. “It was good to see you,” Ben says, resting his hand on my shoulder.

“You, too.”

Deirdre watches him walk out and then turns to me. “Sorry. I thought he was just going to walk me over.” There is too much subterranean pleasure in her look for me to think she is sorry at all.

“I take it this means you two are back on track?”

“I guess.” She shrugs. “I know this sounds crazy, but it feels different this time. We're in touch almost every day, we're seeing each other more often.”

“What does ‘in touch' mean?”

“E-mail, mostly. He doesn't like the phone.”

I can't help but wonder why even the smartest women are so often willing to contort themselves around a man's predilections. Myself included. “Does he still want to date other people?”

“We haven't talked about it. Frankly, I think he just likes holding it out there as an option. He travels so much, he has his kids every other weekend, how much time does he actually have?”

This seems mildly delusional to me but there is nothing to be gained by pointing that out. “What's up with his divorce?”

“You are in a bad mood, aren't you?”

“Sorry.”

Deirdre shakes her head. “Nothing. She's still refusing to sign the papers.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, she won't tell him. She's some goddamned oil heiress, so it's not about money.”

“Oil heiress? I didn't know there was such a thing anymore.”

“It's old money.”

“Apparently.”

“She and her brothers seem to have a penchant for ending up in rehab in Arizona. They should put their name on a clinic instead of
that ridiculous arts center in LA. They certainly spend more quality family time there.” Deirdre's voice, throaty, rich, seemed, even at seventeen, especially at seventeen, hopelessly sophisticated in its perpetual weariness. We are, in many ways, opposites, but we recognized something essential in each other from the very first: Neither of us has the slightest sense of entitlement. An only child, Deirdre shuttled between the two warring camps her parents had set up twelve blocks from each other on the Upper East Side and in the end was left largely alone. Her father moved in with his latest mistress when Deirdre was fourteen. Her mother, sobbing, broken, shameless, sent her two, three times a week to beg him to return. Deirdre still cringes when she recalls the distaste she spied in his eyes, the set of his mouth.

It left her with a deep-seated abhorrence of appearing needy, as if the very act of asking for anything, ever, is a sign of weakness. Even now I don't think she can differentiate between justifiable need and neediness. Any amateur shrink—and she has seen umpteen nonamateurs over the years—could tell her that explains Ben, her entire roster of brilliant, ambitious, semidetached men. I've told her so myself. She knows, of course, but knowing doesn't change a thing. It rarely does. The only man I have ever known her to be with who wasn't completely elusive was Jack. And that did not end well.

I stare at the menu, trying to decide between a cranberry scone and oatmeal. “Not to change the subject, but are we doing carbs this week?” I ask.

Deirdre is always one step ahead of me when it comes to diets. She got a head start, after all, growing up in this city where all forms of beauty maintenance start a good ten years younger than in the rest of the country. I remember how she came to college with some esoteric black soap that you had to lather your face with and then rinse off using exactly thirty splashes of lukewarm water every night. Which she did. Religiously. No matter what. It does seem, though, that the list of what constitutes the bare minimum keeps expanding from manicures and blowouts to Brazilians (judging by my informal poll in the gym locker room, there is not a single female pubic hair
left in Manhattan) and year-round spray tans. Nevertheless, I have always followed Deirdre's advice when it comes to this sort of thing. She once admonished me not to wear gray because it saps the sexuality out of you and I never did again. She instructed me how to make up my deep-set eyes that are just a hairsbreadth farther apart than most people's, something she convinced me was an asset though I had never even noticed it before.

“I'm trying these seaweed capsules,” Deirdre replies.

“I thought we agreed, no diet drugs.”

“They're not a drug. They're completely natural. They're from Germany,” she emphasizes. The European origin adds to their cachet, much like this past summer's rampant use of a certain SPF 60 sunblock from Sweden whose ingredients are not yet FDA-approved and thus has to be brought back from Europe, serving the dual purpose of announcing where you have been and that your skin is far too sensitive for any lotion America can come up with.

“You take three before every meal,” Deirdre continues. “They're supposed to expand in your stomach and make you feel full. The only potential side effect, according to the box, is the risk of choking to death if one accidentally expands in your throat on the way down.”

“That would certainly prevent you from overeating. Do they work?”

“Who knows? My stomach is so bloated from them that I couldn't zip my jeans this morning.”

I glance at Deirdre, who is, in fact, wearing jeans. White jeans. And looks quite thin. As always. With her lankiness, tangle of long, blond hair and strong bone structure, she has the kind of effortless style that appears unthinkingly thrown together and is impossible to deconstruct. Trust me, I've tried. But what works for Deirdre comes off as merely disheveled on me. I console myself with the notion that it is because at five-feet-eight she is a good three inches taller than me, though deep down I suspect there is more to it than that. “You have that hourglass kind of figure men love,” she has assured me
whenever I point out our differences. I appreciate her kindness but remain unconvinced.

“These are a different pair,” Deirdre explains. “My fat jeans.”

I roll my eyes. “There is no such thing as ‘fat' white jeans. It's a complete oxymoron.”

She ignores me. “I'm assuming this is a temporary setback. I'll give it a few more days.”

“You didn't answer my question.”

“What question?”

“Carbs or not?”

She shakes her head. “Too risky.”

We both order scrambled egg whites.

“So how are you?” she asks.

I shrug. “Okay.” I take a sip of coffee, which manages to be both tepid and burnt. Deirdre is having green tea, two bags, and is feeling rather virtuous about it. “I hate this weather.”

“Tell me about it. I made the brilliant decision over the weekend to devote the entire front of the store to cashmere sweaters and boots and it's ninety goddamn degrees outside.”

Four years ago, when her father died and left her all of his not insubstantial estate, Deirdre, who had drifted through various corners of the fashion business, never quite settling in, signed the lease for an eleven-hundred-square-foot boutique in the Flatiron district. She had studied the market carefully and knew precisely what the store would look like, its feel, its tone—though she didn't mention she was even thinking about it until the day she took it over. Despite how close we are, Deirdre rarely tells me of any decision until it is already made. She is not a woman who likes to show her work. Convinced that, faced with too many choices, women end up anxious and confused, she settled on a deceptively simple strategy, classics with a twist, a hem that dipped when it shouldn't, an asymmetrical neckline, just enough to make each piece unique but wearable, a formula that, if not exactly cutting edge, withstands the vicissitudes of trends better than most. Deirdre champions young designers, some of whom leave her at the first whiff of renown, finds others who have been overlooked and
keeps the prices relatively affordable. After a slow start, Aperçu gained word-of-mouth momentum that tipped when
The New York Times
did a quarter-page feature on it in the Sunday Styles section. Despite ebbs and flows as new boutiques opened, her business has settled into a steady groove, though lately she, too, has felt the effects of the economic pall descending on the city.

“Claire is still planning on coming in this Saturday, right?” she asks.

“Are you kidding? It's the only thing she's talked about for days.”

When Deirdre offered to let Claire help out in the store in exchange for clothes her face lit up as if the heavens had opened. Not only did it promise close proximity to her idol, but as far as I can tell shopping is Claire's sole extracurricular interest these days, though she doesn't have an eighth of the allowance some of her classmates do. She and her buddies have taken to going to Bloomingdale's and spending the entire afternoon trying on evening gowns, though why on earth the saleswomen put up with this is beyond me. Then again, there are probably some thirteen-year-olds who whip out their credit cards at the first good fit. Though I do worry that Claire's main area of expertise is the subtle differentials in designer jeans, seeing her look of pure glee at Deirdre's proposal convinced me. I am not above trying to win points with my daughter these days.