That Part Was True (4 page)

Eve was too shocked to reply.

Izzy, as insensitive as she was by nature, may have caught this, the tip of a splinter, because when she went on, she sounded slightly apologetic. “Well, he'll be paying for it after all.”

“Will he?” Eve replied weakly as she bent and moved her handbag under her seat, buying time.

“Of course.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

There was a pause before Izzy said, “I telephoned him to tell him that I was engaged.”

Eve watched a fat bumblebee make its ambling way along the table edge.

“I thought he might want to know,” Izzy finished. There was some defiance in her tone now. Eve was not sure at whom it was aimed.

“And did he?” she asked softly.

“Oh, yes. He was delighted, absolutely delighted.”

“That's nice.” Eve could feel her breath quickening.

“Yes, and he said that he would help with the wedding costs. That was why I thought he might want to see Hadley Hall. You know…before The Day.”

Eve, for the first time, realized that Simon might come to the wedding. With his wife. Not the one he'd left her for; there'd been another since then. But there he'd be, with his wife—Simon the father, the host; a novelty and a star in Izzy's eyes. And she, Eve, would be what she'd always been—the background. She felt crushed. The great, lurking boulder of the past had loosed again and tumbled down on her.

“I got you a cider, Mrs. P.,” Ollie said, returning with the three glasses pressed gaily between his two hands.

Eve barely nodded and didn't reply. All the contentment of the day had been expelled. She tried to pull herself together, but she kept imagining Simon in that receiving line, looking marvelous in his morning suit. He had always been glamorous. She was such a fool not to have thought about it before. She was a silly, idiotic fool.

She got up hastily, intending to escape to the ladies' room, and caught the edge of her glass. Cider splashed all over her skirt.

“Oh, Mummy!” Izzy said, her own tension squeezing her voice so that it came out as a squeal.

A large group of attractive, well-dressed people arrived in the garden just then. The clatter of the glass and Izzy's exclamation drew their attention. Eve, mopping hopelessly at her hemline, could feel everybody looking at her. Blood rushed to her face and her temples felt hot. Leaning forward to shelter herself from view, she was aware that she could not see clearly. Aware of a chaotic aria of discordant, tormenting voices building in her brain, she kept flapping frantically the light fabric at her knees. Until she was unable to catch her breath, entirely unable. She knew she was going to faint, to pass out on the grass in that suddenly crowded little garden, in front of everyone. A small, wretched noise escaped her, high and wild, like the far distant shriek of an ocean bird.

“Mummy?
Mummy…?
”

“Mrs. P.?”

Eve could hear the voices, but was unable to respond.

“I'm a doctor,” a man's voice said. “Your mother, is it? What's her name?” He was a middle-aged man in a golfing shirt. Izzy let him move her away from Eve, who had crumpled with one leg bent back, the way that legs on chalk illustrations in old-fashioned television mysteries always are.

“She's Eve. Mummy…?”

Eve's breathing was uncontrollable now; she was gasping, great labored gasps.

“Eve? I'm Matt. I'm a doctor. Can you hear me?”

Eve could. She turned her face to his with stricken eyes.

Maybe she wasn't fair. Maybe she was dark and round. Everything about her was comforting. Her simple name, the recipes, the way she wrote. She wrote well—plainly and directly, but at times lyrically. His food friend. It seemed at times his best friend.
Mutton is good with plums
, she'd said.

I liked hearing about the plums
, he wrote. Eve had told him about the tree in her garden. She could see it from her kitchen window and she marked the seasons by it. She could not bear waste, she said, and maybe the love of cooking had started there. She never wanted to see the fruit, the beautiful rich ripe fruit with its soft bloom, lying abandoned and rotting. She liked something to come of it. She liked to see the jars of preserves lining her larder. Took real pleasure in it—the regularity of it. And then, of course, the taste. The closer the cook was to the picking, the better the taste was. The intensity of flavor was lost so quickly.

I know what you mean about the effect of proximity to flavor
, he wrote:

It was after midnight. He'd had a quiet dinner alone at a small Italian restaurant in the next town—eaten vongole, drunk a Fernet Branca with the owner, and then driven back at ten and felt like working. It was a good feeling so he'd gone with it. But then, he hadn't worked. He'd turned on his computer and pulled up the screen and, after a moment, lifted a hand toward the familiar keyboard, but not in the fast, heavy, pecking style of a well-built, forty-nine-year-old, successful male author. Not in his usual style. More like a child picking up a crab. As if danger lurked there. He'd tapped out a few words, and stopped. Then he'd sat motionless for a moment fighting the blank. Then he'd shaken his fingers out intently and decided it was just late, he was tired, and then he'd reread Eve's letter about the plums. It was his favorite so far, longer.

It was strange how these missives from Eve, so recently added, were fast becoming part of the fabric of his life. When he read them, he felt like himself. Like his best self. He detected on her ivory-headed notepaper the fine, fresh scent of herbs.

He wanted to solidify the friendship. Deepen it. So at 1:00 a.m., he wrote:

He signed off, took the letter and his empty glass down to the kitchen, and went to bed.

“Well, the good news is your heart is fine.” The doctor beamed at Eve when she said this. She had skin the color of caramel and a fine gold chain at her neck. She shimmered against the municipal blue and dun veneer of the hospital room.

“Yes, thank you,” Eve said, doing her best to respond to the smile. What she thought was, At least if it were my heart, something could be done about it.

“But you should see your own GP soon. Your own GP may want to run some more tests, to be able to discover what is the cause of your symptoms.”

What is the cause? Eve thought, mentally repeating the slight misphrasing. What is the cause?

“Yes,” she said.

“We have only done an EKG here today,” the doctor went on. “So all we know is that there is no immediate danger of a heart attack. But you do not have any other symptoms of heart problems at this stage. The lungs are clear, too. Are you in any discomfort now?”

Eve wanted to shout, Yes! Yes, I am in extreme discomfort. “No,” she said.

The doctor looked at her, sympathetic. “Anxiety can sometimes produce these sorts of symptoms. That is something your own doctor might be able to help you with. There is a great deal that can be done,” she said.

“Yes. Yes. Thank you.” Eve stood to leave, lifting her bag, suddenly terribly heavy, and bracing herself to face Izzy and Ollie, who were waiting outside. And the doctor, taking the signal from her, stood and walked with her to the door.

“I'm fine. I just haven't been sleeping,” Eve said in the corridor, where Ollie and Izzy stood now in front of their hard plastic chairs. Ollie's had scraped and marked the floor when he got up. “And I was perhaps a bit dehydrated.”

“Thank heavens,” Izzy said. Then, “We'll hit terrible traffic on the way back now.”

Jack wished he hadn't said that stuff to Eve; it sounded pretentious in the daylight. But it was too late. Rick had seen the letter lying addressed on the table in the kitchen and mailed it. Rick was a demon for washing things and mailing things.

Damn, Jack thought, once he realized there was no going back; he could foul things up with a woman without even meeting her. He felt irrationally depressed about the possibility of getting things wrong with Eve. There was something about her that made him want to please her. He hadn't felt like that for a long time—for the past fifteen years women had been trying to please him. Not many had managed it.

He decided to go to Hatty's to cheer himself up, and he was ready to leave when he heard footsteps on the front porch. He froze, about to duck out the back, expecting Lisa, and then, shamed, decided to be a man about the thing and speak to her. He blew out hard and went to the door.

“Sorry, are you writing? You're writing, aren't you?”

“No,” Jack replied, taken aback.

“I came to apologize,” Adrienne said.

“Apologize?”

“Yes. I felt so bad about my visit. Quizzing you about your writing. I know better, actually. I know you should never ask an artist about their work. It was intrusive.”

Jack was too surprised by this development to respond. He waited a moment, while his focus firmed.

“So,” she said evenly, “I just wanted to say that I was sorry.”

Jack looked away briefly, toward a cast iron umbrella stand next to the door. It housed a small collection of quirky walking sticks and a Japanese paper parasol. He had never liked it.

“I seem to recall,” he said, looking up again, “that I was the jackass.”

She didn't reply to this, just held his eye, smiling lightly. She was even more attractive than he'd remembered.

“Are you out here with friends?” he asked, glancing past her, expecting to see a couple of young women, waiting, in that way young women wait, with their hips askew and their hair caught up in their dark glasses. There were none.

“No, I drove out to see you.” She turned slightly and nodded toward a black Jeep parked at the curb.

Jack didn't know what to say next, so he suggested that she walk into town with him for coffee, and she agreed.

Walking, they talked about Dex, their common interest.

“I'm glad for him,” Adrienne said. “He's so talented.” The callback had gone the way that Dex had hoped.

“He had a brush with this sort of success about ten years ago, but it faded for some reason,” Jack told her, thinking about Dex in those days. He'd always been the same with him, with Jack. But around other people when those early, bigger parts had started to come, and with them the attention, he'd had a live edge. An energy that was palpable. Speaking to him this week on the phone, hearing his news and the sound of a bar, or a party, in the background, Jack had detected that energy again. He envied it.

“He never stopped working,” he said. “He just kept at it.” He was only just beginning to realize how true this was.

There was silence for a minute, the ground covered. They walked on, the sidewalk warm under their feet, and the sun on their heads, past half a dozen sprawling shingle houses and two red brick historic buildings on which flags fluttered, and a park. And along farther, under the awnings of the dainty colonial downtown stores, full of wooden boats, striped sweaters, and elaborate swimsuits.

“I love the sea,” Adrienne offered eventually.

“So do I. But I liked this bit of it more when it was less gussied up.”

She laughed and Jack felt his ego kick in. The need to keep a woman's attention—a beautiful woman's attention. Old habits.

“Everything's kinda perfect out here these days,” he said. “It's starting to feel unnatural.”

The pair of them paused as an extremely tanned, spry elderly woman blocked their way. She was bending forward, a plastic bag protecting her hands and her rings. Near her a bichon frise waited, panting. Its tongue was the color of strawberry candy—the color of its owner's lipstick.

“No trash in the streets,” Adrienne said when they'd passed.

“No, they keep it all indoors.”

Hatty made coffee the way Jack liked it, without anything in it that Jack couldn't identify. He liked to be able to order a coffee and know that it would come in a thick china cup and smell like coffee and look like coffee. When she saw him, she poured some from the Cona pot she kept in the kitchen for herself and handed it to him with a broad smile. “And what can I get the young lady?” she asked.

“Oh, I'll have coffee, too,” Adrienne said.

Jack was pleased. He watched as she lifted her cup and sipped.

“Were you one of those bookish kids, who always wanted to write, Jack?” she asked, and then immediately a slight shadow crossed her features—concern that she'd strayed again into uncomfortable territory.

Jack felt embarrassed knowing he'd made her feel that way. He had no time for pretension, and although there were certain rituals he'd observed to protect his working life, he wasn't a writer who thought of himself as an artist. If anything, his pretension lay in trying to pretend the opposite. He'd tried, maybe too hard, to give the impression that he was an ordinary workingman. A tradesman, or a high school teacher, like his father had been.

“I wanted to be a journalist, actually,” he said. “I thought I was gonna break some news story about big business or government that would change the world.”

“And did you?”

“I mostly covered sports. And petty crime. And dog shows.”

“So then you started writing fiction?”