Time of My Life (6 page)

Chapter Six

I
t is 1:30 on a Saturday afternoon, and I am running late, frantically, hopelessly late. Which would be bad enough to begin with. But I am tearing through Grand Central Station, which is congested with wayward tourists and suburban dwellers in for the night and well over two dozen homeless men who have taken refuge inside from the sweltering, choking late-July air. My train is scheduled to pull out at 1:32, and though I am darting and bobbing through the clusters of people, there is little hope that I’ll burst onto the platform in less than one hundred and twenty seconds.

Especially because I’ve yet to buy my ticket.

I skid to a stop in front of the counter, thrust forward twelve bucks, and ask for a round-trip ticket to Rye.

The giant electronic clock ticks above me, and that‘s it. I’m officially going to miss the opening festivities of Jackson’s niece’s birthday party. They start with a piñata, and then quickly move on to a treasure hunt before breaking for snacks.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I was supposed to arrive precisely at the appointed hour, where upon I’d spend the rest of the afternoon posturing and preening for Jack’s three siblings, manning the bob-for-apples barrel, and most important, proving to his mother that I was smart enough/beautiful enough/savvy enough/just enough to be dating her son.

And now I was late.

Just freaking great,
I think, as I park on a bench and wipe off the beads of sweat that are launching from my cheekbones onto the parquet floor.

I’d spent the morning at the office: It turns out that even though I thought I had the literal foresight to know even the tiniest details of the Coke campaign, the actual work still required manpower, and since, unlike the last time around, I now helmed this ship, a good portion of that manpower came from me.

“But you’ll be there, right?” Jack asked this morning, as I stuffed down a stale bagel and impatiently waited for the coffee to brew. “Because it will really help things.”

I chewed on the dry dough and swallowed roughly to dislodge it from my throat.

“Of course I’ll be there,” I snapped. “There is nothing I’d rather do than spend the day attempting to impress your mother. Which, I should know, is a near impossibility.”

“Come on, Jill,” Jack said. “She had a right to be annoyed last month.”

Though it had theoretically been over half a decade, I knew exactly to what he was referring. “The debacle” is what he would eventually call it, complete with the requisite finger quotes, and it was “the debacle” that would slowly heave our tilting relationship into a full-on nosedive, not unlike the
Titanic
before it broke in half and plunged under the icy waters of the Atlantic.

It was the sixtieth birthday party of Vivian, Jack’s mom, in June 2000, and they’d come into the city to celebrate at a friend’s apartment—one of those sprawling, full-floor apartments that would smell like money if it didn’t smell like Murphy’s oil and roses, thanks to the live-in housekeeper and on-call florist.

When we arrived, Jack, in a crisp gray suit, kissed his mother’s cheek, and she pulled him in so tight I thought she might not let go. Then she held out a cool hand to me, said, “Jillian,” with a cocked eyebrow, and I wondered if my nose would freeze off from her chill.

“Did you see that?” I whispered, as we made our way to the bar.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jack answered, motioning to the bartender for two scotches. “That’s just her way. She’s not one for affection for people other than family.”

“Would it be too much for her to
change
her way for your girlfriend of two years?”

“Not now,” Jack said. “I don’t want to get into this now.”

“It’s always ‘not now,’ ” I hissed, just as Jack’s three older sisters approached.

“Drop it,” he said with finality.

I grabbed my scotch and headed to the library to calm myself, emerging only for a refill, and then another. When Jack finally found me an hour later, I was twenty blurry pages into
Great Expectations.

“It’s toast time,” he said. “Come out. Mother wants us all there.”

“She won’t miss me,” I replied and flipped a page.

“Come out, Jillian. This isn’t the time or the place to rehash this.”

“When
is
the time or the place, Jack? Because every single time your mother pulls this shit, you either ignore it or act like it’s not up for discussion!” I slammed the book closed and threw it back on the shelf. I tried to stand for emphasis but my knees wobbled below me. Three scotches might do that.

“Just deal with it!” he said, his voice now raised to match mine. “It is how she is. She’s not changing! Why don’t you get that?”

“And why don’t
you
get that if she won’t change, maybe
you’re
the one who needs to?” I was so irate (or perhaps it was those three scotches), my vision blurred.

“So now this is about me?”

“It’s always been about you!”

“And what about you? None of this has anything to do with you?”

“She’s your goddamn mother, Jack!” I yelled. “And I’m your goddamn girlfriend. Why can’t you just tell her that I’m a priority to you? Why can’t you just say, ‘Accept her, Mother!’ Is that so fucking hard?”

“And why can’t you just say, ‘Jack loves her,’ and get over it!” His voice resonated so loudly that the books shook on the walls.

I stared him down—suddenly and instantly sober—too furious to speak, until I noticed an eerie silence humming from the rest of the apartment, the kind of silence that comes when people are pretending not to have overheard something they shouldn’t have overheard, but are too astonished to start talking to cover up their eavesdropping. Jack heard it, too, and I saw his eyes widen.

“Shit,” he muttered underneath his breath, then spun on his heels, and disappeared out the door.

He came to get me thirty minutes later.

“We should leave,” he said.

“Fine by me.” I threw my hands up in the air.

“She heard everything,” he answered flatly, as we stepped onto the elevator with eyes on our backs. “What a total and complete fucking debacle.”

So this morning, when Jack demanded to know if I’d be on time to his niece’s party, I certainly knew why he was more than a little concerned, more than a tad bit overwrought about Vivian’s and my reunion. I didn’t blame him. Last time, yes, I did. Most certainly, I did. But armed with hindsight, I’d resolved to try a different tactic: In my previous life, I’d quietly and desperately fought for Jack to cut the figurative umbilical cord; this time, I’d lose the self-indignation and focus more on the long-term strategy, less on the short-term gratification. After all, swallowing my anger and my ego and, yes, a tiny morsel of my self-respect was a small price for a second shot at my future, or so I considered over my stale bagel and brewing coffee.

And now, at the train station, at the pinnacle moment in which I was truly ready to prove myself, I was running late. What was an honest oversight—a conference call that lingered longer than anticipated—would turn into a full sandstorm of trouble.

The ticker at Grand Central finally indicates that my train (to hell) is boarding, and I lug my heavy feet toward it, pausing briefly at the newsstand to pick up the latest copy of
Esquire,
where Jack is now a senior editor.

“He’s going to be a famous novelist someday,” Vivian told me over scallops at Chanterelle the first time we met. “All of his high school teachers and college professors have said so.”

I nodded with the sort of enthusiasm that only a new girlfriend can muster.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve read his short stories. They’re so good.”

“Not good, my dear,” she corrected me. Vivian smelled of a woman who was rarely corrected herself. “They’re magical.” She took a long sip of Pellegrino and fingered the pearls on her giraffe-like neck, while Jack stared at his fork tines and tried to pretend that he cared as much about his writing as she did.

I flip through the July issue of
Esquire
as the train pulls away from New York. I’d read all of these pieces before, of course, but they are distant enough—like a memory of a story that happened to someone else—that they still feel somewhat fresh. The train barrels forward and eventually spits me out in Rye, only five miles from my future home with Henry, only a stone’s throw from my other life, which now seems not like just another life but like another world entirely.

A mother and young daughter exit the train hand in hand in front of me. The little girl wears a peach smocked dress with white lacy socks and shiny black patent leather shoes. Her curls jingle as she walks. I watch the pair disappear in a patterned rhythm down the platform steps.
Katie.
A surge rushes up inside of me, and then, just as quickly, is gone.

I move my own feet forward and down the same steps. As the person behind me looks on, surely, I, too, disappear as I go on my way.

A
LLIE,
J
ACKSON’S NOW
six-year-old niece and star of the party, was having a meltdown. A meltdown of epic proportions. The magician her mother, Leigh, had hired had magically not appeared as promised, and thus olive-colored snot was flying down Allie’s chin, sticky fists were being thrown around with abandon and fury, tears were flowing, angry and unstoppable. Parents huddled around the pool and feigned sympathy (with just a small dose of judgment and disdain) while Leigh, Jack’s sister, older by four years, attempted to forge peace. But Allie offered no such white flag.

I survey the scene from behind the sliding door just off the patio. Jack and Vivian are hovering near the bar set up for “grownups,” and Bentley, Jack’s father, is nursing what I imagine to be a very,
very
stiff martini and wishing that he were on the golf course, much like he was almost every other Saturday. I smirk: I could almost detect him trying to calculate a getaway; he usually was. Nearly all of the time, I didn’t blame him.

Take me!
I invariably wanted to cry out, just after he’d hop up from the dinner table or the breakfast buffet, citing an emergency in the office or a crisis at one of his plants. Most times, he’d then catch my eye and wink, a sly recognition that if anyone wanted to be the hell away from there more than him, he knew it was me. Bentley and I had a tacit understanding—he placated Vivian because he had to, but he didn’t want me to hold their forty-year marriage against him.

The bartender refills Bentley’s glass, and still, Allie wails.

It’s time for action. I’ve seen this tantrum before, only today, I’ve come prepared, complete with the requisite supplies. I push the glass door to my side, my sweaty palms leaving imprints as I do.

“Allie!” I say, skipping over to her. “Guess what?”

“Whaaaat?” she sputters.

“Turns out that you don’t need that lousy magician! Because I went to magic school, and I can show you a few tricks.” I raise my eyebrows knowingly, and Allie’s screeches stop so abruptly, everyone turns to stare. It is as if all the noise in the world has been sucked into a dry vacuum.

“I don’t believe you,” she says with mixed doubt in her voice.

“Fine, don’t believe me. I can go do my magic tricks inside.” I turn to go and notice Jack now watching me with curiosity. Even Vivian is looking at me with something less than derision, which I suppose is something.

“WAIT!” Allie shouts. “I want to see magic!” She pauses and crosses her arms. “Prove it.”

“Well, before I do, I think you have something stuck in your belly button.”

“Do not!”

“Do too!” I reach down to the waist of her shirt and tuck my hand in. “Told you!”

I pull out a gleaming silver dollar, and Allie squeals. The gaggle of other first graders quickly rush around us, and I turn toward a towheaded boy who had just lost his front tooth. “And you! What do you have behind your ear?” I produce another coin to thundering applause and deafening shrieks of joy that can only emanate from humans under the age of seven.

“Okay, so, birthday girl, pick a card, any card.” I take a deck of cards from my back pocket and shuffle them. Allie purses her lips and meticulously plucks one smack from the middle. “Now put it back.” She does as instructed. I reshuffle the deck two more times, and then cut it in half.

“Is
this
your card?” I ask dramatically.

“YES!” Allie screams, jumping up and down with saucer eyes and nearly frothing at the mouth. “DO IT AGAIN!!!”

And so I did. I did it again and again, and I made little doggies out of balloons, and pulled more coins from their ears, and then I even went to my bag and whipped out a clown makeup kit, painting their faces with strawberry red cheeks and black button noses until the sun slowly faded into the Westchester sky, and fireflies began to flicker around the cavernous grounds of Jackson’s childhood home.

Eventually, Jack and I said our good-byes. Allie wrapped herself around my legs and told me I was the best magician they’d all seen at any party all year. Bentley pulled me into a bear hug, so tight that I could taste the scent of his Cohibas, and even Vivian managed to break her icy facade for more than a glancing second.