She Matters (14 page)

She must have taken the director to meet my father, who would have been jealous and punishing of her, while flattering the lover. Soon she left the magazine, and he hired the next attractive woman, my next unachievable sister.

• • •

Louise slipping from me, I was there for Bert. We could keep her going. I was careful not to equate our abandonment, but I wanted my extravagant loss hailed, too, a friendship death to his marital death, if not quite as traumatic. He should know that none of his friends,
their
friends, understood his sorrow as I did. Louise, who had claimed all our focus, and we'd given it over, was missing. We were disoriented, aimlessly investigating her disguised heart. We met in restaurants, recalling countless meetings, when we'd been the three of us, the four of us. A short while after Louise left Bert, I left Noah, willing to forfeit the apartment. “She was right about him,” I said. “Maybe she's right about me,” Bert said, and I soothed him. For months we went on, evenings at small-scale theater productions, earnest phone conversations that lasted past midnight, Bert's tardy arrivals at bars—he was gravely late, which had driven Louise mad, and they'd carry on a quiet fight for his first few minutes. I would watch her distress rise, hated that. Then she'd bat away conflict with the lilting laugh and puckered eyelids. “He should behave better to you,” I used to say in private, imitating her worldly concern for me, and she'd agree.

• • •

Bert offered to make a dinner. Baking had saved him during the divorce, a relationship to dough and heat that he could master. He turned out one tart after another, caramelizing pears, shaving apples that became crisp browned layers in the oven. When he invited me to his new place, we were by then closer friends than I'd ever been with Louise. Anguish and real rejection, Bert and I found, fed intimacy far better than worship had.

I stood on the platform as the subway left me there. Bert's
directions seemed complicated by excess details as I crossed streets, but then the brownstone appeared, confirmed the effort, and Bert answered the garden-apartment bell. He'd kept the cat, who dove behind the sofa. We were pleased and smiling, our mutual interest something we had built, that belonged to us, and I handed him wine to celebrate new starts. Without her, his habitat was fastidious, stripped of manuscripts and brimming folders, no lilac-silk bathrobe on the back of the bathroom door. He had pens in an earthen cup on the upright piano and cookbooks alphabetized in the kitchen.

The dinner was a wooing as he set out grilled lamb chops and braised vegetables, took his time. We would sleep together, we both knew that. I took my chair and he stood, mixed a vinaigrette for the baby greens—walnut oil and champagne vinegar, my first taste of them. His pear tart and brewed coffee. We'd been heading here, our remarks increasingly sly, giving us excuses to bump shoulders, or slide into each other, my head resting against him at a play. I knew the smell of his coat and also the stronger, more complex smell of his T-shirt, couldn't recall how Louise smelled. In the kitchen I stopped him from the dishes, turned him to me and kissed him, a question answered, like kissing Louise, or what remained of her. After we made love, he walked me to the subway entrance, where we kissed a solid, triumphant kiss, and I went home. Our affair lasted a few weeks, more evenings plotted like the first. I learned Brooklyn's Sunday streets. Sometimes we were happy and silly, other nights just plain glad to be touched. How hard we were working not to mention her. How hard we worked to tend the faint red ember that was about to go out altogether.

W
orking for the movie producer, I occupied a furnished house on the bay in Sag Harbor through the week. I can't say I lived there. The producer, who didn't want to leave the Hamptons, had rented it to be his office, and I was a sort of domestic assistant, tending both the professional duties and the several homelike rooms. He came in the mornings, killed his engine in the driveway. He had the
Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
under his arm, poured himself the coffee I'd made in the kitchen, then sat at his enormous desk, scripts and magazines spread around him. I was his D-Girl—scout, basically—and I read screenplays and short stories and typed coverage on an electric typewriter set up in one of the bedrooms, the door open so I could respond to him.

It had all developed fast, the parting from one job and familiar colleagues, a leap in salary, the unconventional setup to indulge the producer. On weekends, I shuttled my cat back to my studio on Christopher Street in the new Honda Civic the production company had staked me, moon roof open. Some acquaintance, hearing I was out in the Hamptons, told me to call Debra after I was settled. I'd need a friend, yes, a way to occupy the black lampless evenings of rural winter, when the fax machine had been turned off and the essential tasks finished. A couple of weeks in, I called the number, and Debra invited me over that night, her spontaneity an excellent indicator of a new friend. If I had a
bottle of wine in the shabby kitchen, I took it with me. I followed her directions, slowing at each intersection to read the street name, as I mapped my temporary town. I pulled in behind a black Volvo wagon. This woman, I'd been told, had a baby, a career as a writer, which I wished to have, and her husband was an architect. She'd said to come to the back, the glass door that slid open on a deck. I could see in before she saw me.

The kitchen glowed with lights at every level, recessed in the ceiling, hanging in a modern chandelier, tucked under glass cabinets above the extra-deep counters. Debra hung my coat, took my hands in hers, chatting, chatting, she never stopped. Her daughter, not yet a year, sat up in a high chair and worked at the tangerine sections Debra set in front of her. The baby flung the segments to the floor, laughing, and Debra sectioned off a few more. Babies were new to me. At once Debra was telling me local tales, as if in my first days I would have assumed my village part and accumulated pertinent questions. That man at the post office? The bartender Thursday nights at the American Hotel? “You've seen
him,
you can't miss him! You're working for
who
? Oh, God.” She didn't
know
him, no, but it was a
really
small town, you'll see. She loved any detail about my boss, his obscene house under construction, the woman he'd just married, she'd gone to Smith, was she nice? We speculated on his fidelity, past and future.

Her husband, Dean, arrived and hung up his coat, kissed Debra, kissed his daughter. I saw them fit, and I tried to determine my place with them now that we were four. I took a chair next to the baby and began to hand her the fruit, wipe at her cheeks with a damp napkin. I let her play with my bracelets.

Debra made spinach sautéed in nothing but minced garlic and a flick of oil in a cast-iron skillet. She pulled a fish from the oven, decorated it with preserved lemon, olives, bits of fresh tomato,
and from a green glass decanter with a metal spout she drizzled olive oil over it. She set down a bowl of new potatoes in their skins, spotted with parsley. Her thick dark hair was held off her forehead by her constant wrist, flicking up, sweeping back, and at the same time she separated a potato from the bowl, cut it roughly with a fork, and blew on it before she gave it to the baby. I was enchanted by her gestures, the evidence of domestic longevity. They had an oversize wall clock, as regal as a train depot's. Their giant range hulked in black and chrome, burners alight as she finished the food. Each room in the house spilled toward every other. Off the kitchen a wide pantry passageway was provisioned with Le Creuset pots and lids, tins of steel-cut oatmeal, lined-up snow boots, piled catalogs, baskets with polar fleece scarves and vests. Everything looked to me like proof of people entrenched and powerfully able.

I went home with a piece of Debra's almond cake, and I ate it in the morning with coffee, wishing to call. I waited till later.

“Thank you for dinner.”

“That was
so much
fun. You're great with the baby.”

“What are you doing?” I wanted to be invited again. She asked me for the following night, and I muffled my disappointment. It seemed to me I should be in her friendly house right now.

• • •

Weekends, back in the city, busy with my reverse life, I almost forgot her. I'd go to dinner at my father's, where we talked about him; I'd meet my stepmother early Sunday at the flea market; her expert hand shuffled rose gold lockets and vintage clothes. “Now this would be good on you,” she'd say, pausing at a jacket, walking on, leaving me to retrieve it if I wanted it. I went to the movies with my sister or met my aunt for waffles at a diner. Monday mornings,
I started for the Hamptons, zipped up the Long Island Expressway, heading to Debra, who waited for me, for whom I laid out the eccentricities of my family. She'd analyze everyone, explain why someone was like this, someone like that. I found this helpful.

In Sag Harbor we saw each other a lot, daily, or nearly. When she phoned, I said yes, sneaking out on the chores my boss meant for me to do, if he wasn't there. I jumped into her front seat when she pulled up. I didn't want to miss a choice observation. She drove us to the beach, exotic for its chill and emptiness, and related local escapades and crises. She took me to roadside stands for the last fall produce, her car humped up on the sandy bank of the road. We went to the bakery, where the pleasure of hearing her voice as she picked out ciabatta and rye, her breathless ups and downs as she asked playful questions of the baker, was enough, better than bread. Or I waited in the car, I didn't mind, the baby asleep in the back while she ran in. A couple of times, she came over to my house-office for a beer, chic in black turtleneck and dark jeans. With the copy machine imposing on the living room, the visits didn't last long. Instead, she encouraged me to share her pretty life, join, and I did, feeling visible in my want. I wanted her friendship, her things, her smart talk, her tales of voluntary exile from New York City. Sometimes, arriving for an early weeknight supper, I'd find another of her friends in the kitchen. Debra introduced us, and I'd settle in my usual chair, say little, waiting for the woman to go. Once Debra had seen her out, she'd come back to me, indiscreet with backstory she had to have me know.

In her double-sink bathroom, I inspected the labels of the Kiehl's conditioner and Dr. Bronner's shampoo, sniffed its strong peppermint. In the baby's room, I touched the white wood rocker, imagining scenes I never saw. Debra nursing at midnight, diapering, Debra in the shower at 6 a.m., quickly shaving her calves before
she ran downstairs with damp hair to make coffee. She was so brisk and lovely, her voice as light as a girl's, but something rough behind it. We'd play on the rug with her daughter, the evenings growing blue then black beyond the giant, modern windows. Her mother phoned often, her “Sweetheart?” on the answering machine, and Debra would jump up and take the call in the kitchen, her voice almost the one she used for me, between us. I tried to imitate it for the baby, get breathy and sure. I could hear her congenial argument about a
Times
editorial or baby care, short phrases of family shorthand. “Susanna's here,” she'd say and end the call, return to the living room describing the many fond knits of relationship that bound her, secured her. My mother kept me on the phone for hours, an evening's commitment, and she'd drain every private thought out of me, every intention and idea. I could never recover the unwavering self as neatly as Debra did. I could never have said to my mother, “Not now, I have a friend here” without feeding her a saga, or becoming part of the outrage she would show the next person she called. “Sue hung up on me!” At my rental, when I went back at 9 or 9:30, the air was stale, the sheets cold. Every morning I'd clean up breakfast and empty the litter box and make my bed with the drab bedspread before my boss came over to land in his swivel chair and place his boots on the desk, which ran the length of the picture window. He got the view.

At Debra's, the house wrapped in close firs, I had my spot at the table, a slice of imported salami in my hand, talking as she produced wintry meals of Portuguese stews, chopped chard with butter, roast beef. Everything tasted wonderful, well salted. We mixed argument and affection, each insisting what went first on the washed lettuce—the kosher salt, no, the olive oil. When Dean walked in we pretended he could settle it, and he pretended to, sometimes in my favor, sometimes in hers. “I
told
you!” “You see!”
Tipping into each other, we held eye contact like longtime friends, my hand warmed at her waist.

“Susanna's eight years younger than me,” she told Dean at the table, pointing at my face.

“Where were you eight years ago?” I said. How did you get here, build this?

“In New York and married.” She smiled at her husband. “But not to you.” She'd already been in one marriage, had worked in the city, thrived but in another way. The history startled me, put in place, then discarded. I didn't really want to hear. When my mother talked about London in the '60s I'd feel the same: I hadn't existed yet, so forget then. Now, now, Debra was
this,
what she'd always been meant for and what I counted on her to be. We'd been waiting to come together.

• • •

My job ended. I had to leave Sag Harbor, clearing my effects from the office where I'd slept four nights a week for most of a year. I dropped off the key at my boss's carriage house. Across the gravel his main house loomed, the taunt of sudden money. I drove to Debra's, where we stood in the driveway in tears, the little girl on Debra's hip, her hands grabbing at my hair and at her mother's. We vowed to make the effort, knowing it would be difficult. For a short while I lived on Cape Cod, where a monumental blizzard that winter affected us equally. Before phone service went out, she reeled off the news, the halted plows adrift, the streets erased under snows, and I missed those streets. Then I met Christopher and went to live in Montana, she got down to writing a novel, Dean's practice thrived. We kept up, sometimes a frantic e-mail exchange over a whole day, sometimes a single, knowing line. I missed her with an intensity I couldn't convey to Christopher, who'd met her
twice—not enough to
know
Debra as I felt her, the delicious daily companion but something else, too, her competent vibration. Our calls became shorter, the time between them longer.