The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic (2 page)

“Oh, God.”

“—and they got to be friends, and it was all very casual, and then they went away for the weekend, an art exhibition in New York—”

“You don't just go away for the weekend with a casual friend!”

“I know,” Nora said miserably. “He told me all this right after I picked him up at the airport. He wouldn't shut up about her. As though I cared. And then he apologized and said he'd been meaning to tell me, but he didn't want to do it over the phone. And he said he had other friends in town to see. So that's when I said, well, maybe you can stay with one of them. I haven't seen him since.” Maggie nodded her approval, but Nora grimaced. “Well, I kept thinking I'd see him and somehow we'd work it out, but he hasn't called, nothing.

“Oh, and then just to top it off,” she added, “this morning my adviser gave me the something-has-to-change talk. One step away from the what-are-you-still-doing-here talk. My career and my love life, both going up in flames.”

“Oh, honey.” Maggie leaned over suddenly to give Nora a hug. The car veered toward the median for an instant, which made the gesture less reassuring than she intended. “Well, fuck it. So what if grad school doesn't work out? There are plenty of other options. You should open your own restaurant and be a celebrity chef. I mean it. That toffee soufflé you made, my God.”

Nora was silent, thinking again about her morning's conversation with Naomi. Unofficial probation, that's what she was on, even if Naomi hadn't used those words. All at once she missed Adam more than ever. He had brilliant political instincts; he knew exactly how to soothe and beguile the most implacable thesis adviser. Nora wasn't sure how she'd get by without Adam's coaching, not to mention his protective aura. He'd been such a star in the department that some of his prestige had invisibly accrued to her, too. She wondered suddenly how far news of their breakup had spread. Did Naomi know? Yes, Nora thought, or she would have asked me about him this morning. She always did before.

“You sure you want to go to this thing?” Maggie was saying. “Weddings are no fun when you're newly single, not by choice—that's my experience.”

Nora shrugged. “It's okay. How can I not go to Luca's wedding, anyway?”

“Any chance that Adam will be there?”

“No, he's flying back tonight. He wanted to spend the weekend with his
fiancée
.” Nora grimaced as she spoke the last word.

“Bastard. Well, maybe you'll meet someone this weekend. And there'll be lots to drink. Forget about Adam.”

“Just what I'm planning to do.”

•   •   •

Which made it all the more disconcerting, at the party following the rehearsal dinner, to turn and find Adam standing a few feet away. He had a beer in his hand, and he was having a desultory conversation with a couple of law students, friends of Maggie's. He looked vaguely ill at ease even before he saw Nora.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said. “I thought you were back in Chicago.”

He shook his head. “Couldn't change my flight. I'm going back Sunday.”

“So you decided to come to this thing after all.”

“Well, yes. I was invited. Is that a problem?”

“No, I'm just surprised to see you here.”

“You shouldn't be. I've known Chris and Luca a long time. About time they got married.” He took a swig of beer.

Nora bit her lip. “They started dating a month after we did.”

“Really? I thought they'd been together longer.”

“No, I remember. We saw them at that French movie,
Amélie
.”

“God, that was a terrible movie.”

“I liked it.”

“Really?” Nora knew the expression on his face well: Adam enjoying the sense of his own superior judgment. Other, more benighted people had always inspired that look—never her. Then he seemed to recollect himself: “Well, good for you. How are you doing?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“Good.” For an instant, his eyes practically shone with sincerity. “I'm glad. I was a little worried, you know, after the other night.”

Nora wanted to believe him. A man may smile and smile and be a villain. “No, you weren't. You would have called me if you were.”

“I did call you. Couple of times.”

She shook her head. “I would have seen your number.”

They went around and around, until it emerged that Adam had dialed the wrong number, manually. He had a new phone, the kind that knew everything, but he had not bothered to enter her number.

“I see,” Nora said grimly. “Well, as you can tell, I'm just fine.”

“Good.” He started to turn away, then swung back. “You know, I still care about you.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “I care about you, too.”

“You may not want to hear this right now, but I mean it in the best possible way, believe me. When Celeste and I get married this fall, I hope you can be there. I mean it. October sixteenth.”

A few days ago, waiting for Adam in the airport, Nora had been thinking about wedding dates, wondering if October would be too soon. It wasn't as though she'd want a huge, elaborate wedding. “Thank you, Adam,” she said now, smiling, with as much dignity as she could muster. “That's awfully”—she considered and rejected a number of words, settling for a relatively bland and obvious choice that she hoped would trouble Adam anyway—“
stupid
of you.”

She turned and plunged into the crowd. The party was a large, loose affair: It flowed through the house, which belonged to one of the bride's relatives, and onto the rambling cedar decks wrapped around the outside. Plenty of room to retreat.

Nora refilled her wineglass, then topped it up again and again. The alcohol began to make her feel blurry as she drifted from one group to the next, never quite finding her way into the conversation. But the recollection of her encounter with Adam remained razor-sharp. She kept looking for him—to avoid him, she told herself. Once she looked up and saw him looking at her from across the deck. He turned away without acknowledging her.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek, she told herself. Ducking away, she found herself in a room where a cluster of partygoers were watching an old episode of
The Avengers
. She plunked herself on a couch—grateful for its solidity, although her surroundings continued to wobble slightly—and watched John Steed and Emma Peel battle evil, he in a morning coat, she in a catsuit, exchanging arch bons mots. Why can't real love be debonair and
fun
? she wondered.

After a while, she noticed that the man in the chair next to her was looking at her more than at the television. He addressed an occasional remark to her, and laughed when she did. When someone turned the lights up for a moment, she saw that his eyes were a bright green, like traffic lights. She took it as a good omen. They kept talking after someone turned the TV off. His name was Dave, he was in the history department, but he wanted to know about her life outside of grad school. She told him about being a cook after college. An organic café with locally sourced, seasonal menus; Nora made it to sous-chef. “It was fun for a while. But, God, so much work.”

“I hear you,” he said. “I waited tables in college. Whenever I get fed up with sitting in a library, I make myself remember what it was like to be on my feet carrying trays until midnight. So you decided to do something more intellectually challenging, huh?”

“For some reason I thought that would be grad school.” He laughed at that, and they started kissing soon afterward. Dave's lips were softer than she liked, but that was okay. It was the first time she had kissed someone else besides Adam in almost four years. She hoped hazily that he would come into the room and see her with Dave. Doing just fine, thank you.

Dave's phone rang. The ring tone was Rod Stewart:
“Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?” Dave jolted away from Nora. Putting the phone to his ear, he turned, moving toward the door, but Nora still heard more of the conversation than she wanted to.

“Your girlfriend?” she asked when he came back.

He nodded, looking uncomfortable. “Sorry, we just broke up. But she keeps calling me.”

Looking at him, Nora was fairly sure he wasn't telling the whole truth to someone—Nora, his girlfriend, or himself. “Well, fuck,” she said, hitting the arm of the couch. “Call her back. She wants to talk to you.”

He made a face. “She's just emotional.”

“Maybe she has a right to be.”

“Don't be that way, Norma. It's not that big a deal.”

“
Nora,
and yes, it is a big deal.”

She had to wait around for a while until she could get a ride back to the house where she and Maggie were staying. That meant having to avoid both Adam and Dave. She skulked on the deck in the darkness with a Coke, pretending to look at the invisible view over the mountains.

Back in her room, Nora undressed quickly. In the mirror, she saw her brown roots were showing. On some women that was sexy. Nora was not one of them. She tried not to imagine what Celeste looked like.

October 16. How extraordinarily dense of Adam to invite her to the wedding. And Adam always so careful—even calculating—about everything he said. That was what really hurt. He wasn't even trying. He had written her off.

She slid under the sheet. My life is a catastrophe, she thought, shutting her eyes.

Lately, for reassurance, Nora had taken to reminding herself of John Donne's own checkered employment history—his unfinished legal training; the government job he was fired from; the long search for preferment—before he finally found success and security in holy orders. But even at the beginning he had been writing those intricate, intimate poems of passion and thought. Nora was almost thirty, and what did she have to show for herself?

Turning restlessly in bed, she thought: Naomi is right, I don't fit in, I'm all wrong for this. I can't do anything right. Well, maybe saving the life of that mouse today. And it's probably already back in my kitchen, eating my food. I wish my life were different. I don't care how.

•   •   •

She woke early, her mouth dry from all the alcohol she'd drunk the night before. In the other bed, Maggie was still asleep. Nora pulled on a T-shirt and jeans and went quietly out of the room.

The cabin that she and Maggie and four other wedding guests were renting for the weekend perched on the mountainside, at the end of a long gravel driveway lined with rhododendrons. She peered out of the living room window. It had rained during the night, but the sky was clear now. The wedding was not until five. People had talked about driving to Asheville for brunch. So far she was the only one up. Nora made herself some coffee and ate half a bagel, then stepped onto the deck outside. Chilly for May. She thought she might walk down to the road for some exercise, but then she noticed the trail leading up the mountain. She went back inside for a sweatshirt. Out of habit, she stopped by the bookshelf in the living room to see if there was a paperback that she could stuff into her pocket for emergencies—you never knew when you might need a book to entertain and comfort and distract you in the day's empty places.

There was not much to choose from. She passed on the Robert Ludlum and a couple of the
Dune
books in favor of a yellowed paperback edition of
Pride and Prejudice
that had originally cost fifty cents. Privately Nora agreed with Charlotte Brontë that Jane Austen's world was too manicured for sustained interest, but on the other hand you could always dip in and find something amusing on almost any page. Besides, she had to teach the novel in summer school next month.

No reason to leave a note. She would be back in half an hour. Nora went outside and started up the path. At first it tunneled through more rhododendrons, but the forest brightened when she reached a stand of hardwoods, skinny gray poles, newly leafed out. There was almost no undergrowth at this time of year, only dead leaves covering the ground as far as she could see.

After the novelty of walking somewhere that wasn't a street or a campus path had worn off, Nora began to find the upward-sloping, dun-colored landscape monotonous. She was wondering whether to head back when suddenly the path leveled off and she stepped out of the woods onto grass.

A fragment of conversation from the party last night came back to her. So this was what Chris's cousin meant by the Bald. The crown of the mountain was an immense green meadow. A few steps forward, and Nora had a 360-degree view of the undulating horizon, mountains rising in all directions.

She walked across the meadow, feeling her heart lift in spite of herself. Ye visions of the hills, and souls of lonely places. Nora found herself smiling. She had the absurd thought—she squelched it quickly—that she could bring Adam up here to show him this place.

Nora turned back when she reached the other side of the hilltop. It was going to rain again, she saw with regret; gray clouds were looming in the west. Otherwise, she would have been tempted to sit down and read for a while. She retraced her steps across the meadow. There was no sign of the trail where she thought it should be, but she reasoned that if she followed the edge of the woods, she was bound to come across the path, even if she had to circle the entire mountaintop.

The first raindrops hit her face as she walked along. Still no path. She walked faster. After a few minutes, she saw a gap in the trees and what looked like the beginnings of a path.

But was it the right one? There might be several paths. A disturbing thought crystallized: If she took the wrong trail down, she could wind up on the other side of the mountain, miles from where she wanted to be.

Oh, well, she thought as the rain began to pelt down, I can go a little way and see whether it looks familiar.