That Part Was True (9 page)

“Sure,” he said, conscious of a sense of wanting to escape—a feeling he had had many times in his life, but not these past few weeks with Adrienne. From habit he turned his voice jokey, his first defense with women. “Sure,” he said. “Only I'd like to get in some practice lashing myself to the mast before I head into the swells again.”

She smiled, but she did not laugh.

Ollie's laugh was too loud. He was drunk, or getting drunk, Eve thought with dismay. She had already had two champagne cocktails herself, both consumed too quickly, her hands clutching the glass stems so tightly that she was in danger of snapping one. She must not worry. She must not. “Two eggs,” she recited softly. “Four ounces of butter.” In the absence of a ticking clock, Beth had suggested that concentrating on a familiar recipe might help her to compose herself. Six ounces of sugar… Eve thought. But then two things had happened. Ollie laughed and Simon Petworth appeared in the doorway. Izzy's engagement party was beginning to warm up. Of these events, the former had the greater danger in it.

Simon's arrival was not an ambush. He and Izzy, with Eve's consent, had choreographed it. Izzy had wanted Simon at her party, and Eve had understood that Izzy would like to have both of her parents there, though she found it uncomfortable to think of herself and Simon that way—as a single entity. She had succeeded so well in separating herself from him, and their short marriage, in the years that had intervened since his departure. And now, this new Simon, with his flesh-and-blood concerns, seemed different to her anyway from the charismatic, yet detached, man that she remembered—the man who had always seemed distinct from her, if she were honest, even before he had left her. When she thought of them together, as a married couple, she saw herself as a silly young woman, so much less sure than Izzy was, a young woman who'd been desperate for something, someone, stronger to hold on to.

It occurred to her now that Ollie might be doing this same thing with Izzy. It was an unpleasant thought, but surprisingly, it calmed her. Her own fluttery concerns were washed away with new, more powerful ones for her daughter. She looked back at Ollie, who was still grinning too broadly, grabbing hands and pumping them with too much fervor, kissing too many pretty girls in pretty dresses too heavily. She was watching him so intently that she took her eyes off her ex-husband's entrance and presently he was at her side.

“Hello, Eve,” he said. His voice had not changed. Of course it hadn't. Why had she imagined that it would have? Nothing about his physical self had changed. The reshaping of him had been wrought at a more elemental level.

“I won't stay long,” he said. Reassuring her, she supposed, that he would stand by their agreement, their compromise for her benefit, that he would arrive a little late and leave early, so as not to hijack the party—his own expression. He would come alone, he had suggested to Izzy, so as not to upset her mother, and avoid “hijacking the party.” Her friends, he had explained sensibly, might be curious about a father arriving so late on the scene, and that was not the point of the gathering. He was paying for it, of course, with the same open-palmed generosity that he was showing toward the wedding arrangements. He had offered to meet with Eve privately earlier, but she had declined.

“Hello, Simon,” she said at last. They looked at each other for a moment, each immersed briefly in the past, but with different pictures in their minds. Each slightly apologetic, imagining more fault on their own part than there probably had been. Each allowing less blame to sheer weight of circumstance than was actually appropriate.

“Eve, I—” he began.

“Izzy has spotted you,” Eve cut in brightly—as if she were speaking to one of the toddlers who came into the shop.

Izzy approached them warily, not knowing how to behave when seeing her parents together. Eve was flooded with feeling for her. It was hardly surprising her daughter was such a crisp thing. She was brittle. Not hard, like Virginia had been, as, to her shame now, Eve had once thought. This evening, particularly, she looked strained. She had a wonderful new dress, a flattering sheath of rose pink, but she seemed frail in it. Her eyes were faintly shadowed beneath her makeup. She glanced from one parent to another, and Simon, seeming to catch her nervousness, too, smiled paternally at her and said, “You look very beautiful, my dear. Are you enjoying your party?”

This last inquiry, Eve noted, suggested concern. She was pleased. Perhaps Simon's presence would be a positive one. Perhaps, after all, rather than taking something from her, he would add something. She had done a poor job of raising Izzy; she could see that now. Maybe if Simon had indeed developed some sense of his duties toward her, he would be, not a threat, but an ally.

When Izzy smiled, it looked forced. “Oh, yes, it's wonderful. Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. And you, too, Mummy. Thanks for everything.”

Eve and Simon smiled at her together. Two corners of a triangle.

Then Ollie joined them. “Hello, sir,” he said.

Both Eve and Izzy looked at Ollie nervously, but he seemed to sober under Simon's gaze.

“Nice to see you again,” he said squarely, straightening himself and extending a firm hand, which Simon shook.

“Good evening, Ollie.” They had been introduced over drinks the previous week.

Ollie, still directing himself to Simon, took Eve's arm then, and said, “I'm just going to borrow my mother-in-law-to-be, if you don't mind. I'd like her to meet some of my friends.”

Eve wondered if they had planned this, too, mapped her exit for her, and discovered she didn't mind if they had.

Simon, smiling assent, said, “I'm so glad to have seen you, Eve,” as Ollie turned, leading her away.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, and I you.” She felt as if she had slain a dragon.

Ollie, steering Eve into the nearest small knot of young people, introduced her to each of them. They were people that he worked with, peripheral, tidily polite, and slightly awkwardly presented. In other parts of the room older, more familiar friends, the longer-term crowd from school and childhood and early London days, were relaxed and laughing, planning by now where they'd go on to afterward.

Eve greeted everybody, and then, in the empty half-beat that followed, Ollie took another drink from a passing tray and finished it quickly. His grip on Eve's elbow as he led her off again tightened, and then, all of a sudden, as if his strings had been cut, he let go and set his whole weight against an art deco console standing between the twin arches that led through to the bar from the main reception room. The large vase of flowers it supported teetered.

“Shit,” he said. Then, recovering himself, “Sorry, Mrs. P. Bit tight.”

Eve looked at him levelly. “Yes,” she said. “You are.”

“I know, sorry…” He put his hand to his mouth as if to take the expletive back and adopted the expression of an impish eleven-year-old.

“Not much shocks me, Ollie,” Eve said. “Certainly not language. I grew up tugging at the petticoats of a woman who had a vocabulary to rival a dockworker's. But I am worried about you and Izzy tonight. You both seem…on edge.”

He repeated the loud laugh. “Yeah, we're
On Edge
,” Ollie said. It was the first time he'd ever spoken rudely to Eve. They were both aware of it.

“Sorry, Mrs. P.,” he said, sounding like himself again. “It's this wedding stuff.”

He looked so young in his smart suit. Strange how dressing older always made people look younger, Eve thought. “I know,” she said gently. “I know.”

At the end of the evening, Eve kissed Izzy a light, but sympathetic good night and told her to get some sleep. Simon had already left. She had watched his retreating back with a surprising lack of feeling—a strangely exhilarating lack of feeling. She took the hotel elevator to the room that Izzy had booked for her and sat on the edge of the big bed, on which the covers had been expertly turned back, and looked at herself in the long mirror on the dressing table opposite. She was exhausted, but she had done it. She had traveled to London and got through the entire party. She had met Simon. She had stood by her daughter's side just like any ordinary mother might. She slid off her shoes and rubbed her feet. They were aching, but she felt, anyway, like dancing.

“Would you not
do that, honey?”

“I'm sorry, not do what?”

“Not break the bread into those teeny-tiny liddle mouse turd things.”

Adrienne looked at her hands, as if they had a life separate from the rest of her, and paused from rolling small pieces of bread into balls and dropping them onto her side plate.

“This bothers you?” she said, turning her palm over so that one of the little balls was displayed there, like something fragile and precious—a pearl.

“Yep. It does. It bothers me.”

“It's just a habit, I guess. I always do it.”

“I know you do.”

“And it bothers you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But you've never said anything before.”

“I guess maybe we've only just reached the ‘It bothers me that you like to turn bread into mouse turds' stage.”

“I don't think this is about bread, Jack.”

“Believe me, it's about bread.”

“I really don't think it is, Jack.”

Jack looked over his shoulder, hoping, although for reasons other than hunger, that the waiter would arrive with his stuffed zucchini. There was no sign of him. They were eating at a small, brightly lit place with a tile floor. It was called The Glass House—Adrienne's choice. The zucchini had looked to Jack like the only thing you could eat without instigating some sort of revolution in your gut. He had said something along these lines to Adrienne, but she had continued to gaze seriously at the menu in response, running a tranquil finger down the italicized lettering.

When the waiter had come—too friendly, like a lay preacher, hovering in his black T-shirt with half a day's stubble on his face—he and Adrienne had entered into a five-minute, intense discussion and then she had ordered a green salad as she almost always did.

“That's it?” Jack said, incredulous, as the waiter removed their menus, floridly snapped them closed, and left, looking, Jack thought, ridiculously self-satisfied for a guy who was hustling lima beans for a living.

“What do you mean?” Adrienne had asked.

“Twenty minutes of discussion and you order a green salad?”

“It wasn't twenty minutes,” she said. Then she started with the bread-balling thing.

Now she gazed at him, clear-eyed. “I think this is a bigger issue, Jack.”

“I don't.”

“It's a food issue.”

“Well, I daresay there's some member of the animal kingdom that eats mouse turds, but for me it's not a food issue. It's a mouse turd issue. It bothers me that you turn your bread into mouse turds. Although…” He lifted the bread, which was heavy, brown, and studded with seeds and grains, and he made a play of weighing it in his hands. “I dunno, maybe that is the best use for it.” He rolled a little ball himself and grinned. “How was the shoot?” he asked, sidestepping, giving up.

Adrienne brushed her hands together, ousting invisible crumbs, and said, “The shoot was fine.”

“No kids? No dogs? No divas?”

“A very nice, very old, man. An astronomer. He won the Pulitzer.”

“Good. Good for him.”

“Jack, I think we need to confront this food issue.”

“There is no
food issue
.”

“Yes, Jack, there is. You have a food issue. You're obsessed with food. It's draining your creativity. You're not writing and you're obsessing about food. It's like a…transference thing, you're transferring your writing skill, your ability to concoct things with words, into concocting things with food. It concerns me, Jack.”

“It concerns you?”

“Yes.” She reached across and laid her fingers delicately on his. “I think it's holding you back.”

Jack stared. But he knew that some of the blame for the conversation was his. He'd reopened the route to it.

He'd done a stupid thing. He'd let Adrienne read something he'd written. Handed the pages to her with a script in his head that he knew she could not possibly adhere to. It was some work he'd done that morning, work that in other times he'd have considered merely bulk, let sit awhile and then lifted from it perhaps one sentence, and discarded the rest. But in his recent, less sure, frame of mind, he'd been meddling, fiddling with his material and, in the bothering of it, losing his way. He knew that, knew the answer was to step aside from it, but he hadn't been able to. He'd kept poking at it like worrying a tooth, and then he had involved Adrienne. Dumb.

She had looked at the work and read it quickly and then looked back at him, searching.

She's a bright woman, he'd thought. He'd made Manhattans; he sipped his.

“What is it you're looking for, Jack?” she'd asked.

“Looking for?” he replied—the repetition like a faint starter's gun for an altercation.

She hadn't heard it. “I'm not sure,” she said, judging the impact of each word before uttering it, “whether you're looking for critique, or…” She paused again and sipped her own drink.

He didn't help her out.

“Reassurance,” she finished softly. Her voice sounded unusually warm.

It was the warmth, ironically, that jerked him—a sudden, upward pull. If she'd responded harshly, he'd have let go, allowed himself to be swept away in a senseless flood of irritation.

“Reassurance, naturally.”

He stood up, crossed the room, and took the sheets of paper from her and kissed her. “I'm a sap for words of praise. Particularly from those I care about,” he said.

Adrienne, looking unconvinced, but rescued nevertheless, smiled. “This drink is very nice,” she said.

“Aah,” he'd said, smiling back, putting his own glass down and dropping to his knees in front of her, “Now you'll see the effect that a few drops of flattery can have on a man of needy disposition.”

“You might consider fasting,” Adrienne said now, “as a way of getting back in touch with your real writing. As a purging process—clear all the clutter from your mind and body so that the new ideas can flow freely.”

Their meal arrived. The waiter put Adrienne's salad in front of her as if it were a salver of gemstones. She smiled gently in response. Then, to Jack's dismay, she resumed the conversation, “Yes, a fast,” she said, as if settling a major decision. “We could both do it.”

“Honey, I sure as hell am not about to give up the plain unadulterated joy of eating just in case the muse is a goddam anorexic.”

“I'm not an anorexic, Jack.”

Jack looked at her, struck by a string of instant understandings: First, that what she had said was true; Adrienne ate with no fervor, but she ate. Second, that she had forced a leap over the safety wall between third person and first, which in turn took them deeper into “couple” territory and the attendant depths of revelation. And then, something else. “No,” he said in the dawn of it. “But you want to be the muse, don't you? Is that what it was with whatshisname? Terry?”

“Terrence,” Adrienne corrected. Her ex-husband, a singer and songwriter, moderately successful. She thought for a moment. “When we were married, yes, he said I inspired him. I don't know if I'd use the term ‘muse,' though.”

“I would,” Jack said. “And I think there are flesh-and-blood women who honestly believe that's what they are. That they can inspire art. Is that what you believe, Adrienne? Do you think you can inspire me?”

“You're shouting, Jack.”

“Claptrap has that effect on me. So does this trash.” He tipped his plate on an angle toward her. It was large white square; four tiny zucchini were arranged on a nest of what looked like yellow hay in the center of it. His voice rose again as he said, “I am suddenly filled with the desire to hunt out some place where they'll knock the horns off something corpulent and serve it up to me with a sharp knife and a side of fried balls.”

When the waiter came to clear Jack's untouched meal, Adrienne smiled apologetically and said, “He's having a bad day.”

You'll want very dark plums
, Eve wrote:

Eve had written to Jack about the Christmas cake while sitting on the big hotel bed still feeling the gentle fizz of the party aftermath. She had wanted to talk to a friend. Tell a friend how the evening had gone, but she had realized that the years of isolation had cost her more than her family. Perhaps she could have written to Erica, rekindled the warmth that had once been between them, but leaning against the plumped pillows, she had admitted to herself that it wasn't Erica she wanted to talk to, but Jack.

And so she had, divorcing the missive from the image she held in her head now of Jack and his beautiful willow, or mermaid. That's what she looked like—Adrienne Charles—a mermaid. But that was of no interest to her, she told herself. Her relationship with Jack, her friendship, was a separate thing. A chaste, if warm, thing based on a mutual interest. There was no harm in that, no matter what Jack's romantic attachments were.

She went to sleep with the image Jack had painted, of the two of them, in her head. The two of them in Paris. Eating. Talking about cooking. Why not, she thought. She had overcome so much—why not keep marching?

Jack had left New York the night before after a tense conversation with Adrienne. Well, tense on his side. On hers an infuriating calm had reigned. Jack had suggested that he should leave town early, but that he would call her in a day or two to see whether she would like to come out for the weekend. It had been, after all, the first argument they'd had.

“Yes, I think that's the best plan,” she'd agreed, looking at him sympathetically. As if, he thought, he were recounting an embarrassing incident in which he had come off worst.

At home he wrote:

Jack left off from this exchange feeling content. A weekend with Dex. No order required. No sensitivity. No ticklish femininity to contend with. With Dex, even disagreements had an understandable, collaborative rhythm.

“Dex is coming out this weekend.”

“It would have been nice to see him,” Adrienne said. Jack could imagine her with her telephone held just away from her ear. He had not wanted her to come, since Dex was, but now that she had said she wouldn't, he was disappointed.

Adrienne, reacting to his silence, said, as if answering something unasked, “We were never an item, you know. Dex and I.”