That Part Was True (11 page)

“My God,” Dex said, “I got to you just in time.”

Ollie did not want any porridge. He came downstairs before Izzy and said no to Eve's offer. He just wanted coffee. She was glad to see him help himself. Not because it saved her the job, but because it spoke to his comfort in her house. She wanted him to be comfortable in her house.

“All right, dear,” she said.

They smiled shyly at each other then. It was the first time she had called him anything other than Ollie.

He drank his coffee quickly and then said he would go into town for the papers. Man's work, an expedition to disappear into. “Do you need anything, Mrs. P.?”

“No,” she said. No, she didn't.

Ollie took his jacket from the back of a chair and pulled it on. The corduroy collar stood up on one side. Eve fought a sudden urge to flatten it. The door shut behind him with a jaded click.

As the car pulled away, Izzy came into the kitchen, still not dressed, wearing a dressing gown she'd had since her school days. Her hair wasn't brushed. She looked bloodless. She accepted some porridge and put both her hands around it as if gaining some more profound warmth from the bowl, then spooned cream and brown sugar over it and ate a few bites in silence while Eve made a fresh pot of tea.

“I expect you heard us,” Izzy said.

Eve, putting the teapot on the table, did not deny it, though she would have liked to.

“We had a row,” Izzy explained redundantly.

“You've a lot on your plates,” Eve replied.

“Yes.” Izzy poured herself some tea and added milk from a blue and white jug. “This was Gin-gin's, wasn't it?” she said, looking at it.

“Yes, it was. I brought it down from that last flat she had in Primrose Hill.”

“I miss her so much.” Izzy lowered the little jug, staring at it gravely. “I'm sick of hearing what a bitch she was. I miss her.”

Eve thought for a moment, searching for just the right resources. She wanted to react the way that Gwen or Beth had reacted to her in moments like this. She wanted to offer stout comfort, neither too hale, nor too yielding.

“I'm not surprised,” she said gently.

Izzy raised her eyes. There was a nervy twitch of disquiet in them, but her voice was unfaltering. “You hated her, though, didn't you? And my father hated her, too. Simon…he said nobody liked her, but me.”

Eve sighed and clung fast to the rock of objectivity. “She was a difficult woman. A very difficult woman, and a difficult mother, but that does not diminish your relationship with her. You two had your own relationship and that was important in your life. It still is. I would not want to think that I had made you feel that you shouldn't love her, just because I couldn't.”

The strange thing was this was the first time that Eve had actually admitted, said out loud, that she had not loved her mother. It was such an intrinsic idea that children loved their parents that she had never voiced it. To say the words was a liberation. She put a hand on Izzy's shoulder; it felt fragile through the thick flannel of the dressing gown. “I'll try to help,” she said. “In any way I can.”

Izzy did not reply, but reached her own hand up and lay it briefly on top of Eve's; a gesture for which, basking in that second's warmth, Eve was so grateful she almost wept. Then she broke away and began busily clearing breakfast things and assembling ingredients on the countertop.

“What are you making?” Izzy asked.

“Pumpkin pie.”

“How very American. I don't think I've ever had it.”

“No, nor have I, that's why…well, I thought it would be nice to have something different. Something new.”

“It's all new, isn't it?” Izzy said, standing and crossing the kitchen to the sink, where she rinsed her empty bowl absently. “Everything's new.”

“Okay, so this broad writes you a fan letter and then you start writing to each other about porridge and now you're going to Paris to share your mutual love of crêpes. Is that it?”

“More or less.”

They were back on the road. Jack was driving, glad of the lack of potential for eye contact.

“And it's all aboveboard? No smutty stuff?”

“No smutty stuff.”

“It's madness, Jack.” He reached to tuck a map back into the glove compartment. “I can see the appeal…mystery stranger and all, but it's madness. That kind of stuff never plays out well in the real world.”

“The real world is an overrated concept.”

“Actually, I agree with you. But it doesn't change my view of this. You really seem shaken up lately. I don't think you're thinking the way you would have, even a few months ago. And I think this stuff…romanticizing a woman you've never met, and probably never will, is part of that. Part of this period of…I dunno…mental turmoil you're going through.”

“People are very keen all of a sudden to tell me what I'm going through,” Jack said.

“Well, maybe ‘people' can see things that you can't.”

“Such as?”

“Such as, you're floundering a bit, and it's not Marnie. I mean I think the breakup with Marnie affected you, but not in a deep way. I don't think you were ever in love with her.”

Jack was surprised at this. Not at the fact of it, but at Dex's saying it. “Was it that obvious?”

“Pretty much. To me anyway. To her, too, probably.”

“I'm sick of making women unhappy, Dex.” Jack sighed, settling back against the seat. They were on a long, straight stretch of road; the car was driving itself. “It's senseless and tiring. I'm too old for it.”

“What about Adrienne?” Dex said.

“What about Adrienne?”

“Well, she's an attractive woman, Jack. I talked to her, she's into you. Why not just settle down with Adrienne for a while? Take some time to figure things out. Maybe you should even see a shrink or somethin'. You're sure as hell not gonna get any closer to what you want chasing after some lonesome English spinster in Paris. That's if it is a lonesome English spinster. It's probably some queer old lech in Morocco who's leading you on. Hell, Jack. Don't make me have to fly over there to identify your body.”

Jack smiled, but didn't reply. He pulled the car over in an empty rest area. “Stretch your legs?” he asked.

“Sure.”

Jack got out of the car and leaned against it, gazing across the open stretch of road at the still-bright leaves of a sugar maple. Dex, getting out, too, rounded the trunk and leaned next to him. Then he folded his arms and listed lightly sideways.

They stood there, in the crisp, raw-edged quiet, fusing the warmth of their upper arms and fall-weight jackets, and the thin, bantering jocularity that their friendship hung on in the day-to-day was dispelled. Jack felt, emanating from Dex, not the sticky, often tipsy, affection that they had expressed for each other many times over the years, but the pure, deep sincerity of concern.

Jack had told Dex about Eve in part to hear Dex say what he had said. What Jack had been pretty sure he'd say: that the thing was crazy. Because, sometimes, in daylight, Jack thought that it was, too. Something about his relationship with Eve was a bit strange. Not the relationship in itself so much as his dependence on it, on a stranger.

Later, when they stopped for gas, Dex went inside to use the restroom and buy coffee, and Jack parked and called Adrienne.

“Hi, honey.”

“Jack?”

“Who you expectin'?”

She laughed lightly. Behind him Jack could hear the relentless hum of highway traffic beyond the sheltering band of buildings and billboards and road signs.

“Well, I wasn't particularly expecting you. I thought you two might have sworn off women, you know, men of the road and all?”

“Yeah, well, it is a pretty testosterone-fueled trip.”

She laughed again. It sounded nice.

“I miss you,” he said. He could see Dex walking across the forecourt back to the car.

“That's sweet.”

“Will you come out next weekend?”

“Um…sure, I think so. Call me when you get back, I'll know by then.”

Her diffidence made him want her more.

Dex opened the door and got back into the car. He held a newspaper up to Jack and banged his hand against it, against a photograph of himself. It was a piece about the new movie.

“Did Adrienne take that?” Jack asked, settling himself back into the driver's seat.

“No, it was a promo shot,” Dex replied. “The ones Adrienne took are better.”

“She's good, isn't she?”

“Sure she is. Don't think I'd set you up with any old no-hope, do you?”

Jack laughed. “No,” he said. “I don't think you would.”

“It's dodgy,” Gwen said. “You read about these things all the time. Weirdos on the Internet.”

“He's not a weirdo, Gwen.”

“Well, people don't think weirdos are weirdos either, do they? That's the problem.”

“His name is Jackson Cooper. He's a very well known author.”

“He says he is.”

“Well, I'll know, won't I?”

“How?”

“Well, if I see a man who looks like Jackson Cooper, I'll know it's him.”

“He could still be a weirdo. Plenty of famous people are weirdos.”

“I suppose that's true,” Eve said. She knew that Gwen was the voice of reason in her life, and that what she was saying now was, in fact, extremely reasonable. It was exactly what she would have said to someone else: Don't be foolish.

“You don't want to be flying off to a foreign country to meet a weirdo,” Gwen said. “Anyway, there's plenty of 'em down at The White Horse on a Saturday night if you're interested.”

Eve thought about this conversation while she finished making the pie. Then, when the pork was in the oven, she sat down to look at the arts pages from the day before's papers. There was a story about some new film that was due out in the spring. She read it, oblivious to the connection between the stunning-looking actor in the photographs and herself.

“I told you
I'd missed you.”

“I believe you now.”

In the late afternoon light, her features were softer, blurred, so that the precise nose and clean lip line were less sculpted, as if the perfect wax of her had begun to melt. It made him sentimental. He ran a finger down her arm and stroked the intimate white cleft inside her elbow, allowing himself a moment's fearless tumble into adoration.

“We got on to a wrong foot back there,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” Adrienne agreed, distinctly, but with no vehemence.

“I don't want that to happen again. At least I'd like to avoid it as far as possible.” He kissed her shoulder.

Adrienne shifted, unpinning her hand from his bare back. The movement awakened, not only the freshly exposed skin, but the rest of him. He rolled and sat up. The familiar room, the skewed buff and gold bedclothes, the beginning of a fine crack in the plaster in one corner of the ceiling, came back into focus.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said, smiling, sitting up, too. Her small, pretty breasts cleared the sheet and hovered there, shivery as light on diamonds. She made him think, as always, of sheer things, of water.

“Stay,” he said. “I'll bring it up.”

She rearranged a pillow and pressed her spine into it and smiled.

When he came back with the glasses and the bottle, he sat on the foot end of the bed and looked at her. They toasted each other with a small lift of their glasses.

“You're a very beautiful woman,” Jack said.

“Thank you,” she replied without coyness, accepting the compliment as she might a comment about her height. Her comfort with herself was another contrast to other women that Jack had been involved with, more neurotic women—bubblier, funnier, sexier even, in a more obvious way, but neurotic. Jack had begun to realize that he had enough neuroses. He didn't need to go adding to it.

“I was thinking about the holidays,” he said. “I thought I might have a party out here at Thanksgiving. I haven't had a friends-and-neighbors shindig for a while and I owe a few folks.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“You around? Want to come out? I wondered if you could take some time, spend a week or so maybe?”

It was only later that he realized she hadn't answered his question about Thanksgiving. He had taken her glass from her in the wake of the asking, and put it on the bedside table, next to the leather travel clock that had been his father's. Then he had cupped one of those cool, pert breasts and made love to her again, slowly, almost respectfully. It was dark by the time they had bathed and dressed and come downstairs.

“So whattya say?” he asked as they sat down to eat. It was a simple dinner, a concession to her. If he couldn't make it work with Adrienne, he knew, it would be his own fault. She was a grown-up—an attractive, talented woman with no appendages. He was going to make a go of it.

“I usually spend Thanksgiving with my father, Jack. In San Francisco,” she said.

He waited for an invitation, knowing as he did that he did not really want one, and yet he was mildly deflated, too, when none was offered.

“Oh, sure. Of course. Maybe Christmas then.”

“Sure,” she said.

“Or New Year's,” he suggested, wanting a definitive response from her. Wanting her to commit to something—to him. She kept floating past, out of reach. Her lack of availability was testing him.

“New Year's,” she said, smiling. “That's awhile off yet.”

Jack thought the sign-off marginally formal. More like the tone of her first messages. She had not mentioned Paris, and he was quietly relieved that the plan had apparently been shelved. Adrienne might not take the idea so well after all—you could never bet on women's reactions to this sort of stuff. He could, of course, invite her. Adrienne could come to Paris with him. They could both meet Eve. But even while he was engaged in this reasoning, he knew that it was absurd. Eve was something different. Had been something different, he thought, all along. Something apart from the rest of his life.

He replied:

Jack went to Lisa's house for Thanksgiving. She had the thing catered by some crowd who came out from New York, and she spent most of the occasion attached to her German billionaire, a tall guy with an anvil of a jaw and a personality to match.

The German billionaire's teenage children were there, too. Three of them. They looked at Lisa with a level of loathing that was palpable. Lisa looked at them as though they were preschoolers. She spoke to them that way, too. No doubt she wished that they were. Jack, distanced now, and imbued with the benevolence that guilt can engender in a man, felt for her. He could see, from his new, sympathetic standpoint, that if the German billionaire had come with perhaps just one small girl in tow, Lisa might have had a chance—she could have wooed a small girl with baubles and fun. Because, Jack realized suddenly, many of Lisa's peskier attributes would mellow to that in response to the soothing action of regular affection—fun. He was pleased to note that the billionaire was watching her work the room with the expression of a boy who'd caught a butterfly in a jar.

“This is Bitsy,” she said to Jack now, with a look that implied that she was doing him a favor; her new coupled status had made her gracious.

Bitsy, a toothy divorcée who had once been married to a prominent politician, grinned at Jack. She was accompanied by a flirtatious seventeen-year-old daughter, who appeared to have attracted the attention of one of the billionaire's kids. She grinned at Jack, too. Jack was already looking for an exit. When the billionaire's kid edged clumsily into their group, he excused himself gratefully.

“Sort of a circus, isn't it?” he said, cheered to find refuge in the shape of an old friend, Henry Franklin, who was standing in a corner, next to a built-in display cabinet that was as loaded with trinkets and china and expensive geegaws as the rest of the house. Today, with the addition of candles, flowers, a profusion of florid holiday decorations, and the lively, dressed-up crowd, the effect was kaleidoscopic. Henry was watching the proceedings with an expression that Jack felt summed up his own feelings: somewhere between fascinated and appalled.

“Mostly chimps and clowns,” Henry answered.

“How are you, Henry?”

“Not so bad, Jackson, my boy. How are you?”

“Working up to divorce number two. Coming up to fifty. Looking for the meaning of life.”

“Stop lookin'. It'll bite you on the ass when you least expect it.”

Jack laughed.

“Anyhow,” Henry said, “don't go getting het up about fifty. Nothing wrong with fifty except how fast sixty races after it.” He sipped his drink. “And you don't even want to know about seventy and eighty,” he said. “Those bastards come at you from behind.”

They both laughed then.

“I'm sorry I haven't been out more since…” Jack hesitated and took a sip of his own drink, an occasion-inspired Campari and soda, reminded again of his recent lack of charity.

“Since Suzanna died,” Henry finished.

“Since Suzanna died,” Jack echoed.

“Well, without Suzanna, I'm not so colorful.”

“Aren't you?” Jack asked seriously.

“Nope. Thinner, too.”

“She was the best cook I ever knew.”

“She said that about you.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Henry was wearing his customary tweed jacket and maroon bow tie. He looked at Jack, not like a father might, but maybe like one of those wise college professors you tend to remember romantically when you graduate. “So how come you're not cooking today? I was kinda hoping for an invitation. In fact, the only reason I accepted this one, apart from the fact that it saved me from flying out to my daughter's house to get treated like a geriatric for three days, was to see you and ask you to cook a fillet of beef for Christmas.”

“I'm cooking a bit less these days, Henry,” Jack said. “I think I cook like other people drink—to forget.”

“Bullshit,” Henry said. “Some woman is selling you a pile.”

“Henry, you're the second person in as many months who's accused me of being unable to think without a woman's influence.”

“Not unable, Jack, unwilling.”

Beyond them Lisa giggled. Jack shuddered involuntarily.

“Why would you say that? I think of myself as kind of a man's man type.”

“Yeah, well, over fifty that's nonsense. When men say that stuff, it just means that they do what women tell 'em to do like any other schmuck, but then they make women cry and kid themselves that they're heroes. Luckily, intelligent men, if they're heterosexual—two camps in which I put you firmly—get over the idea eventually that they're independent of women. It took me a long time to figure out that I needed Suzanna and that I didn't wanna make her cry anymore.”

“I'm surprised that you ever made Suzanna cry. You were the happiest couple I ever met.”

“Maybe it was the cooking.”

“Maybe.”

“Don't quit cooking, Jack, and don't give up on the idea that a good woman, the right woman, isn't out there for you. Too many men your age shack up with some bland jellyfish, or worse, a nurse, just because they're scared. They're scared of rattling 'round on their own with egg on their ties waiting for the mailman to find 'em dead on the doorstep after they've tried to pee in the open some frosty night. Jack, if you don't find the right woman, live alone and write and cook a lot. That's what you're good at, and in the end it's the stuff you're good at that brings you joy, lets you be yourself. I'm a helluvan old man, Jack, and I know. Now invite me over for Christmas and go get me another drink. And watch out for that one with the teeth and the little Lolita in tow. She'll have you in irons before you can say alimony.”

The next day Jack got up late. The sea and the sky were merged and steely, and there was a heavy frost. He lit a fire and put on some music. Then, in a kitchen unencumbered by pretension or waste, he sliced six onions and put them into a heavy skillet in some melted butter on a low heat. Conscious of the pleasant sensation of sighing contentment—Jack found the process of caramelizing onions as warming as a hot bath—he left the pan and the butter to do their work and went back to the fire and sat down with a book.

It was a slim, fashionable, contemporary novel—a present from Adrienne. She had sent it, courier-delivered, with a note. “Jack, you must read this. Adrienne.”
You must
. If Jack had raised an eyebrow at the emphasis, he had lowered it again deliberately. Okay, he would.

He sat with a glass of Pernod and propped his moccasined feet on the worn needlepoint of his favorite footstool. The scent of onions drifted to him and he let the sweet aroma fill him up. The fire was making the homely noises that fires make and the strains of a familiar pianist wandered, massing and thinning, across the room from the speaker in the corner. He opened Adrienne's gift cautiously, as if turning over a rock, and then split the spine slightly with his thumb, so that he could read with one hand.

By the time Jack had read five pages, he was wondering what he could say to Adrienne. She had called to make sure that the book had arrived and was clearly intent on discussing its contents with him. He read five more pages. Then he got up and went and stirred the onions a couple of times with a wooden spatula, though there was no need. Then he went back to the book for the third time, lifting it and looking at it the way an old man looks at his watch. He skimmed a few more pages. By this time his lack of interest was intense enough to start to bite into the pleasure of the smell of onions.

He closed the book, stared at the cover for a moment—a beautiful image of a leaf outlined in black—and then he got up and walked back into the kitchen. He flipped the lid of the garbage can with his foot and dropped the book into it. Then he drained his Pernod.

Staring out at the flat horizon and the pinches of sugary frost that dressed the fringes of the November landscape, Jack knew that a lack of bad habits was not going to be enough to sustain his relationship with Adrienne. And he also knew, with no escape from the knowing, that that was pretty much what the thing came down to. She had no obvious demerits, and he was on his best behavior. But one of these nights soon, he was gonna want to go and eat a good steak and talk about oysters, or lay up with a little trash fiction while she was around, and although he knew that Adrienne would not complain or argue about these things, might even give him a quiet sort of permission to pursue them, that would not be enough. The air between them would be permanently dangerous, prickly with compromise. The negotiation would exhaust both of them. It wasn't worth it. He was going to have to face up to true bachelorhood. Not this playing at bachelorhood thing. The real deal. He was going to have to be alone with himself and see if they got on.