That Part Was True (3 page)

“Yes,” he interrupted again. “Yes, you
meant
why don't I write something that proves that I
can
write. Something to demonstrate that I am not simply a third-rate hack who got lucky pandering to the tastes of bored husbands on vacation and illiterate morons who can't pronounce ‘Proust.'”

Adrienne looked at him steadily. “My father belongs in neither of those categories,” she said.

The reasonableness of this response did nothing to mollify Jack. “Listen,” he said, openly angry now, allowing himself the headlong dive into raw aggression that always felt so blazingly justified in the moment. “I don't need secondhand compliments—
‘My father likes your books. My granny likes your books.'
I get them all the time from people who need to put some distance between the sort of stuff I write and the sort of stuff they keep on their nightstands to remind themselves that they could quote four lines of Eliot in college.” He took up the knife and began slicing again. The taut metallic seesaw of the blade against the board echoed the set of his features.

Adrienne, silent, watched.

Lisa, who at some point had materialized behind her, watched silently, too, but only for a moment. She shouldered past Adrienne, crossed the kitchen quickly, and ran two protective arms around Jack's waist from behind. She had heard enough of the conversation to gather its theme if not its specifics. “Jack's a great writer,” she said.

Jack, flinging the knife down so that it landed quivering, spun to face Lisa and wrenched her hands away roughly. “Lisa, will you please just
lay off
,” he yelled.

Lisa was drunk, but not that drunk. She turned and walked straight out of the kitchen door without looking back.

Adrienne watched Jack for a moment longer and then, wordless, too, went to collect her things and say good-bye to Dex. After she'd gone, when Dex came looking for him, Jack lifted the knife, but not his eyes, in his direction, a warning. Dex heeded it.

A courier came to the door and Gwen answered.

“Couldn't tell me where Marsh Farm is, could you, love?” he asked as she signed for the package he handed her.

Gwen could, and did. And then, when the van had turned on the gravel and left the lane as silent as it usually was again, she went into the library and handed Eve the package.

Eve, seeing the parcel, wondered, hoped a little, that it might be something from Jack Cooper. Of course it wasn't. She admonished herself as she removed from it, after Gwen had gone to finish her ironing, a black ring binder labeled “Wedding” and a note from Izzy.

“You'll see I've highlighted the things that are on your list,” Izzy had written. “Mostly telephone calls, e-mails, checking on prices and availability, that sort of thing.” Her tone implied—simple things, things that Eve could manage, as opposed to other, more important things that she could not.

Eve flipped through the binder, noting the highlighted items. She could manage them, but the bigger picture was clearing for her for the first time since Izzy and Ollie had told her about their impending marriage. The wedding. Eve felt alarm begin to fizz in the pit of her stomach. A wedding, a big wedding, knowing Izzy. People and parties—all the things that Eve had spent the last few years avoiding, and some years even before that if she was honest. The sorts of things that Virginia had done. And, even Eve could admit, done well. So much better than she ever could.

“Stress is for unemployed folks and victims of repression and racism. And pussies,” Jack said. “Healthy, white, middle-class American men have no right to it.”

Jim laughed and looked across his desk at Jack, whom he'd been treating for minor ailments for twenty years.

“Well, something's going on,” he said. “Your blood pressure's higher than I've ever known it, and the rash might be viral, or some sort of contact dermatitis, maybe an allergy, but these things tend to be exacerbated by stress.”

Jack had finished buttoning his shirt. The rash, a small flare of scarlet dots on his chest, had subsided considerably before he'd shown it to Jim, casually, in the course of a routine checkup. But he had mentioned it anyway because he was accustomed to having the sort of hale, muscular, regularly handsome and reliable sort of body that rarely betrays or surprises a person, even so slightly.

Jim finished writing a prescription for mild hydrocortisone and handed it to him. “Take a vacation maybe. Go fishing,” he said.

Jack laughed. Fishing was Jim's prescription for most things. Oftentimes it worked.

Jack walked home feeling better. There'd been no mention of the strain of the previous afternoon. The night before, he'd finished making the crostini and he and Dex had eaten it in close to silence, and then, later, he'd served the ratatouille with Rioja. They'd listened to Duke Ellington. They'd gone to bed early.

Dex had slept late. And, Jack had noted, finding him in the kitchen when he came out of his study, the sleep had done him good. Dex was eight years younger than Jack. One night's sleep dissolved the years. Jack figured he had reached the point where it took at least three.

At his car, tossing a bag in the trunk, Dex had said, “Tell me to break a leg.”

“Break a leg,” Jack had echoed rotely.

Dex got into the car and said through the open window, “Got a callback for something good.” He turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear.

Jack, watching his face, saw that intent purposefulness again. “Break a leg,” he said, this time sincerely. He had slapped the car roof and, in the hollow of the reverberation, felt foolish.

But now, walking back, it was all easing in him a bit. Maybe Jim was right and he had been stressed. What the hell, these things happened to middle-aged men. He just needed to get quiet again. Get back to work. Get in a routine. It wasn't like he really missed Marnie.

Jack adjusted his hat, a beaten-up Panama to which he was extremely attached, against the gathering summer heat and thought about his seven-year marriage to Marnie. He couldn't believe it had lasted seven years. From the get-go it had been halfhearted on his part, and probably hers, too, he thought now, the way things had turned out. Although he still couldn't believe he'd been so naïve about the Carla thing. It would never have occurred to him that Marnie was schtupping—or whatever the correct term was for lesbians—a vacationing librarian from Wisconsin. Much less that she'd leave him for her. Marnie's little passions had always seemed so lightweight: the pottery, the herb growing, the children's book—cute, but lightweight.

He had slipped, he realized, in those last months with Marnie—or years, maybe—into an unattractive, but addictive, state of assumed superiority.

He thought then, as he always did when he was searching for the better parts of himself, of his father, who had watched him saunter up to a sprint starting line once, aged fourteen, overly confident of the field, and seen him soundly beaten by a hitherto unnoticed, scrawny twelve-year-old. Afterward he'd chided Jack for sulking.

“Son,” he'd said. “There's talent everywhere. But you can't tell it from the surface of things and nothing will blind you to the possibility of it like cockiness.”

Jack had almost protested this, but his father's expression had silenced him.

“So, next time you're feeling superior, Jack, lie down until it passes.”

Jack liked to say that he had never forgotten that, never forgotten the kind, wise look on his father's face when he'd said those words. But he had, he thought, he had.

For a while there, a nice, unchallenging little wife had suited him. He was Jackson Cooper, successful writer, good cook, and all-round terrific guy. Wasn't that right? Everybody said so.

Jack shook his head at himself and sent a small prayer of apology to his father and a vow to do better, and then, lifted, he went into the new French Market.

Inside the place was, as he'd suspected it would be, artfully quaint, but to its credit, the smell of cheese was evident and, near the back, of bread. He passed the rows of stuff designed for display rather than eating—oddly shaped bottles of fancy vinegar, jars full of bloated fruit, like pickled body parts, and incongruously colored pasta—and found a bottle of soy sauce and a jar of Dijon mustard and took them to the counter, where he paid a young man with a sharp haircut.

“How are you, Mr. Cooper?” the young man asked, handing Jack his purchases in a refined brown bag.

Jack, lost in the cloud of his thoughts still, must have looked vague when he said, “Fine. Just Fine, thanks.”

The young man laughed.

“I'm Josh,” he said. “Josh Hapwell. I cut your grass for three summers.”

Jack looked at the young man steadily while pocketing his change. “You that little runt of a kid?”

The young man laughed again. Jack figured him for early twenties.

“Yep. I'm the manager here now.”

Jack smiled. “That right?” He remembered Josh, helping his father out in the garden. He'd been a thin boy and timid for his age. The dad had moved on at some point and Jack hadn't seen much of Josh after that.

“Yes, sir,” Josh said. “So if there's anything I can do for you, just let me know.”

“There is one thing you can do for me, Josh.”

Josh looked across the counter at him, attentive.

“Don't ever call me ‘sir' again.”

Back at the house, Jack took a cold beer from the supply of two that Rick always left cooling for him on summer afternoons and fixed himself some tuna and boiled eggs. He ate on the deck and read awhile and then he wrote to Eve: 

Then he laid the pen down and thought about her; tried to picture her.

Fair, he thought, fair and fifty-five. Slim and unremarkable. The women who read his books were fair and fifty-five, slim and unremarkable. They picked them up after their husbands had discarded them and then surprised themselves by quite liking them. Although, he thought, Eve's praise had had a different quality. Not grudging. There was no “Not bad” in that first letter of hers. And the way she wrote about food. There was something in that that spoke to something in him.

“Jack,” he signed, feeling for the first time in weeks…soothed, balanced again. He needed to apologize to Lisa, and he would. He felt bad about the whole business. But he'd pick his moment, so that she didn't take it for an opening. He wanted to be straight with her—decent and straight. He went to get his second beer and took it up to the study with him. He'd look over what he'd done that morning, call his agent. Answer some e-mails. He'd get a hold of himself.

“Hello?” Jack lifted his watch from the bedside table and looked at it as he switched on the lamp—3:00 a.m. “Marnie?” he said.

“Jack, I…”

“Marnie, it's three a.m.”

“I'm sorry, Jack, I wasn't thinking. I'm not thinking straight.” She was crying. The sound, bouncing off satellites, streaming through wires, crossing state lines, echoed accusingly in his ear. He swung his legs out over the edge of the bed and sighed. “What's up, hon?”

There was a beat, a pause for regrouping on her end. Then, “We were always friends, Jack.”

“Were we?” he asked, too wearily. Too sincerely.

Marnie, making the switch from tears to acidity with an abruptness that no man is ever prepared for, particularly at 3:00 a.m., came back hard and fast. “Well, I tried to be your friend, Jack. It was you who shut me out, not the other way around.”

Jack sighed again. “Marnie, I'm not sure what it is you want from me right now.”

There was a pause. Marnie was apparently not sure of this either. Between them, the satellites and the wires remained open, alive and expectant.

“Listen, Marnie. I think maybe you oughtta talk to someone; you know a shrink or something. I can't advise you. I really can't.”

“That's rich.”

Damn, he'd walked into it. There'd be no stopping her.

“You're the one who needs a shrink, Jack. I might be a bit unglued at the moment, but at least I'm in touch with my emotions. I know that I have some problems, I can admit that. You're the one who's keeping it all inside, who doesn't know what he wants, and can't talk about it. Maybe if you could have talked—opened up to me—we wouldn't be in this mess, Jack. Have you considered that? Has it ever occurred to you that this might be in some way your fault, too? Have you taken any responsibility at all for the breakdown of our marriage, Jack? Because I am not prepared to take all the blame. I was the one who left, yes, but you drove me to it, Jack. I had no choice.” Her voice cracked then and she began to sob.

Jack waited. Then he said, “Honey, it's okay. You're tired, though. You need some sleep. I'll call you in a few days. Just try to get a little sleep…okay?”

“I
am
tired,” she said eventually. The tears reduced somewhat, she sniffed, but she made no clear move toward hanging up and Jack didn't feel that he could initiate one without setting her off again.

Three o'clock in the morning, he thought, and I am sitting on the edge of my bed in my underwear listening to a woman sniff.

The Salt Zone
,
and above, larger, “Jackson Cooper.” In fact, it said, “Coop,” the “er” having been obscured by a gold sticker proclaiming best-seller status. There was an illustration, too—all moody deep blues and dusky indigo—of a man with a gun standing over a pretty girl. The pretty girl was dead.

Eve thought the book's cover calculatedly masculine, pointlessly so, and wondered idly how these things came about—covers and titles and so forth. Not the sorts of things she'd ever thought about before. Certainly she had not been thinking about them when she'd brought that first novel of Jack's—not his first, but the first she'd read—home from the Red Cross.

Eve, who had read a great deal since childhood, intensely if not particularly widely, had felt tired that day, one of the few she'd spent at the shop in the previous six months. It was a Friday and the weekend had loomed, friendless, in front of her, but she had not wanted to spend it in the company of another, fictional, woman, unhappy in love or battling lightly with life. She'd wanted a companion with energy, a story she wouldn't have to work at, or weep over. She'd already taken two paperbacks from the “Books” shelf, but they were both battered and exuding the faint, morbid aroma of damp, and she knew already that she lacked enthusiasm for either.

Then an attractively disheveled woman had come to the shop doorway and called, “We've had a clear-out.” As if this was a mildly amusing statement. She'd dropped a pile of books and a bulging plastic sack full of bric-a-brac on the floor and rushed off again. Her car was double-parked outside.

Eve, watching her, acknowledging the donation with a small smile and coming out from behind the counter to collect the items, had thought: That's a woman with a husband—a husband and a noisy family and probably a dog. She could imagine the woman complaining about them all, with the sort of cheerful relish that the complaining of people who have nothing really to complain about is always infused with. She had lifted Jack's book from the top of the things that the woman no longer wanted and held it to her chest, closing both hands over it while the car pulled away, as if to catch some of that blithe busy-ness. Then she had dropped it into her bag and, dutifully, put a pound into the cash register to cover its cost.

She'd read
Dead Letters
in almost a single sitting, allowing herself the great luxury of two chapters in the bath—a small defiance, it was the kind of thing that Virginia, for all her own self-indulgences, would have berated her for. Then she'd sat up in bed with two pillows at her back while Jack's hero, Harry Gordon—a dry-witted sleuth with gourmet tastes and a talent for observation—battled a bitter mother-in-law, a suicidal ex-wife, the traditional forces of law, and his conscience for three hundred pages.

At first she'd read fast, as if she were clinging to a moving vehicle, pulled along by the pace of the plot. But then she'd slowed, deliberately, to appreciate the writing—the humor in the choppy sentences, the evocative descriptions of meals and scenery. She'd felt the heat when there was heat, and the fear when there was fear, and the loneliness that underlay the story coming off the page. It had done what good stories always do, made her forget her own.

Eve put her glass down now and lifted
The Salt Zone
from the table next to the sofa. On the back of it there was a photograph of a man, in his late thirties maybe—a ruggedly handsome man wearing a blue open-necked shirt and chinos. He had soft brown hair and a relaxed smile and eyes the color of a spring sky—there were creases at the corners of them. He was tanned. He had looked as relaxed in his skin as an old Labrador even then, ten years before she'd even heard of him. Jack. Her Jack.

“Just move that, Mummy, if it's in your way. It's Ollie's.”

Eve put the book down hurriedly. “Jackson Cooper,” she said, lingering over the name as if it were a foreign word she was taking care to pronounce correctly.

“Jackson Cooper?” Ollie repeated, coming into the room, sitting with his drink, “The Harry Gordon novels. They made the movies out of them.”

“Movies?”

“They're Boy Films. All gritty men and nervy women,” Izzy explained to her mother.

“You enjoyed that last one,” Ollie protested.

“Did not,” Izzy said, arranging and rearranging herself on the sofa. She made a little grunt as if the cushions had set out to irk her.

Ollie ruffled her hair, then smoothed it again, invading that fine carapace only gently, temporarily.

“Did so,” he said.

They both laughed. A single, out-of-place strand of Izzy's hair still clung to her cheek. Eve was pleased to see that she did not dislodge it. She felt warmed by the witnessing of such a light moment between them. They had come down for the night so that Izzy could discuss wedding plans with her. Eve was not eager about the prospect.

Ollie, the bonus guest, cushion between the two women, dropped himself into an easy chair, all dangly charm and winsome scruffiness, and said, “These cheese straws are fantastic, Mrs. P. You ought to get some sort of award for them.”

Eve smiled. At least their visits gave her people to cook for, a bit of purpose. Her house would take no more of her trim domesticity; it was already delightfully decorated. She had a conservatory full of freshly painted Lloyd Loom, a well-ordered linen closet, and a pantry full of preserves. There wasn't a whisper of dust on the silk lampshades, the magazines on the ottomans were neatly stacked, and the silver lay polished, wrapped, and labeled in the rosewood sideboard. The Georgian dining table, which, with spare leaves inserted, seated twelve comfortably, glowed permanently, with a watchful sheen. Eve's was a perfect family home, with no family in it.

She offered Ollie a dainty mosaic of hors d'oeuvres and he lifted a miniature tomato tart delicately between two fingers and held it to the light.

“It's like a jewel,” he said. Then he tossed it up into the air and caught it in his mouth—a boy, his brown curly hair overdue for a cut.

He's good-looking, Eve thought, and sweet. Virginia, who'd met Ollie twice before she died, had declared him “manageable.” It was a compliment, but Eve had heard in it criticism, not so much of her own choice, but more her skills where managing men was concerned. Had Simon been manageable? Or sweet? She couldn't remember. She'd been so blind-sided by the romance of him, she hadn't paid much attention really to his personality. And then, so soon, he'd been gone. She tried not to think about it.

“What do you call your own mother, Ollie?” she asked. The prospect of being called Mrs. P. for the rest of her life had limited appeal.

Ollie laughed. “I call her Ma, but it infuriates her. She'd like us to call her Adele, and pretend that we were her nephew and niece. She can get away with telling people she's thirty-nine except when Cassie and I are around.” Cassandra was Ollie's sister, two years his senior, and a painter. “Cassie goes along with it, of course. I'm the black sheep.”

Eve, who had an outsider's ear for nuance, immediately sensed the insecurity in this. “She must be very proud of you,” she said, aware as she spoke that it was a meaningless platitude. Her own mother had never been proud of her.

“Oh, I'm not so sure. She thinks my work is pretty dull. The corporate banking world isn't exactly her thing. Cassie's the one who's fulfilled her expectations.”

Eve wanted to reassure, to say something kind and sustaining, but she did not want to say something else that was dishonest. She had heard those sorts of things enough herself, from well-meaning types, parents of school friends, her husband even. People were extremely loath to accept the notion that a mother, particularly, might not love her child, but Eve knew it could happen, and full of sympathy and more, empathy, for Ollie at that moment, she was shocked to find herself thinking not of her own mother's feelings for her—which she had accepted, if never exactly come to terms with. But, rather, of her own relationship with Izzy.

Did she love Izzy? She remembered her birth and her lack of preparation for it, the terror she'd felt when the tiny screaming infant had been laid in her arms afterward. The difficulties of breastfeeding and joyless, sleepless nights. She had read since about postnatal depression and been sure that was what she had been suffering from. No one had said such a thing to her at the time.

Eve thought now about the way Gwen had talked about visiting her daughters after their babies, Gwen's grandchildren, had been born. How she'd told Eve animatedly that she'd put a duster around, or sorted laundry while the new mother caught up on her rest. That she'd left a stew, or a pie in the refrigerator. Eve knew that she was not that sort of mother to Izzy. Was that what Izzy wanted?

Ollie interrupted her thoughts. “I expect you'll meet her before the wedding,” he said. “She comes over to shop from time to time.” He laughed softly.

Eve wondered what Adele would make of Izzy when they did meet. It sounded as if she might not approve. Izzy had her grandmother's forceful personality, but she was conventional. Like me, Eve thought, strangely pleased. She smiled at Ollie, realizing for the first time that Izzy was probably a stalwart ship in the unsteady sea of his life. She hoped that it would work out. And then she hoped that when it didn't, nobody would be too badly hurt.

“But, Mummy, of course you must come,” Izzy said, pouring herself some tea from the pot the next morning. She was leaning against the Aga; Eve kept it lit year-round. She turned with the fresh cup full in her hand and lifted it, watching Eve over the rim with an expression that was sapping to opposition.

“It must be a hundred miles from here,” Eve said.

“Eighty-six. We'll leave in half an hour and be back for supper. Then, tomorrow, Ollie and I will get up early and drive back to London. You can make us a picnic breakfast for the car if you like. Put some of these in it.” Eve had made cinnamon rolls; Izzy gestured to the one in her hand.

“Izzy, you and Ollie are quite capable of choosing your own wedding venue. You don't need me along.”

“No, we don't, Mummy. But that's what mothers do, isn't it?” It was a small flare. She fanned it. “Gin-gin would have loved to come,” she said. But her best goading had never got the sort of reaction from Eve that she'd been able to ignite in her grandmother.

Eve, dusting cinnamon and crumbs from the work-top into the palm of her hand, simply said, “Yes, I expect she would have.” But she knew that the argument, weak in any case, was lost.

The day promised warmth. Eve dressed in simple, white cotton, lace-edged underwear and a light blue dress with a square neckline and no sleeves. Her arms were slim and tanned from the little gardening she still did. Light work—weeding, watering, and deadheading—was what she enjoyed. She left the rest to Mr. Feltnam, who'd been working for her for years and needed no instruction—something that Eve was glad of, since instructing people had never been her strong suit.

She had worn the dress only a few times before, and reaching back to zip it up, she looked at herself critically in the full-length mirror in the small rectangular dressing area adjacent to her bedroom. Then she brushed her hair with a silver-backed brush, inherited from a grandmother on her father's side whom she had never known, but who, in the two photographs of her that existed, bore a striking resemblance to Eve: slight, almond-eyed, with high cheekbones and a long neck.

The dress suited her; she could see that. But she wasn't sure it gave her any authority—the sort of authority that she associated with mothers of brides. She unzipped it again and took it off, sliding it down over her legs to the floor. Then she hung it back on its padded hanger and removed a white skirt from a different one that she teamed with a lemon twin-set and two strands of pearls. She wasn't particularly fond of pearls, but they went some way at least toward achieving the look she was striving for—capable.

The woman in the neat trouser suit whose job it was to show them around Hadley Hall and point out details such as good places for receiving lines, and photographs, and all those other things that Izzy seemed as familiar with as she, was formidable, but no match, Eve noted, for Izzy.

Ollie, winking theatrically at Eve at one point, said, “Lucky it's not up to us, Mrs. P. We'd be in a tent on the green with a fish supper.”

Eve smiled—he really was endearing—and said, “I like a fish supper myself.” She was feeling relieved. The drive up, music in the car and one stop for some awful coffee and packets of peppermints, had been uneventful, pleasant even. She was hopeful.

“Ollie, are you listening to any of this?” Izzy said crisply.

“Yes, beloved, every word.”

They stopped in a nearby village on the way back. Izzy wanted to look at bed-and-breakfast places, for friends who would stay after the reception. Eve was amazed at how much thinking she'd given to the thing already. They had six months yet. It was to be a winter wedding.

“In the snow,” Izzy had told her over the phone.

“I'm not sure you can bank on snow,” Eve had suggested tentatively. Izzy, if always daunting, was doubly so with regard to her wedding plans.

“Well, it's not as if I can bank on sunshine in July, is it,” she'd countered. They'd had two weeks of rain. Outside, as they spoke, it was pouring in Dorset, so Eve had agreed and written lightly “Order snow” on a page in her file.

Now Izzy set her bulging ring binder down on the wooden bench table outside the village pub. It was a lovely day, the sky mellowed by dainty clouds—an English day. And the pub, like its surroundings, was postcard perfect with a small, pretty garden. Ollie went in to buy the drinks, and Izzy, settling herself once she'd written some notes under the heading “B & Bs,” said, “Do you think I should bring Daddy out here, before I book it?”