All the Time in the World (17 page)

The minute we're through the door, I regret it. They've gotten back on their feet, my old friends, and there's only one thing that could have gotten them there.

I have played this out so many times in my mind, but I don't react to this first clear sighting of Jess in the strong, courageously aloof way that I always imagined I should. What I feel is something close to longing. All I want, the minute that I see her face, is for her to bless me with her attention, to think of something witty to say so that she'll laugh, to be singled out as worthy of a meaningful conversation.

She is holding court without even trying to, as if her gravitational field is stronger than those around her. Such is Jess's magnetism, and it has not diminished over the years. The whole group spots us the minute we walk in the door, and they clap and exclaim and make a scene over Everett, and Jess throws her arms around him, murmuring into his neck about how wonderful, how insightful he is. Before the waves of nostalgia have released me from their grip, she has her arms around me. “I looked everywhere for you earlier,” she says. “I am so glad to see you! It's been a minute, hasn't it.”

I was never able to find the words to explain what had happened with Jess to any of my friends, not even Everett. It was possible that I had made too much of the situation. Sometimes I told myself that I couldn't say anything to anyone besides Jane and Claudia because I didn't want to put those who knew her in a position where they had to choose, Jess or me. But standing a few years outside of it, I can admit to myself that it probably had more to do with putting myself in a position where I might not be chosen.

I pull back from her, and she is holding on to the back of my dress strap—what is it with these dress straps; are they preternaturally shiny or something?—and I remember what Everett said. Her feelings are so huge. His assessment was exactly right, as usual.

“Hey,” I say, but she doesn't give me time to not say anything else, to freeze her out, like I planned to before I saw her. She is pulling me in another direction, away from the safety of my protective cluster, and calling over her shoulder to them.

“We'll be right back!” she says, linking her arm through mine. “I promised someone I'd introduce him to Charlotte.”

“Don't you want to introduce him to Everett?” I ask.

“I'm sure he's met Everett. Everett is the man of the hour,” she says.

I let her drag me along, trying not to view it as symbolic, and from behind me, I hear a burst of laughter from my friends, and I wonder which one of them made the Jess-and-Charlotte-in-a-tree joke. I had indulged them in school, letting them make all the fun they wanted of how obviously Jess favored me, laughing right along with them. In my most honest heart of hearts, I was glad that everyone could see it. Jess was a genius, internationally recognized as brilliant, and she chose me. I was her wunderkind.

Now I'm standing with her in front of the man I just finished telling the tale of my ocean adventures to, listening to her rave about the downtown series he just produced, which featured students in their final year at Juilliard. I watch with a kind of awed detachment as they laugh together, and I find him giving me an “oh, you” kind of look, as if he's in on the sophisticated witticism of our earlier conversation, and I know the way he feels about me forthwith is all because of Jess's prestige. I accept his business card on her credit, and she tells him she'll connect us via e-mail. The words fellowship and observership and internship are thrown around, but I can't hang on to any of them in my churning consciousness.

Jess and I make our way back to the old familiar group, and it's not hard for me to say very little for the rest of our time there, to find excuses to move away from the group and toward the bar, or the bathroom, or the lobby to check my phone, or anywhere else outside the orbit of my past life. It's not hard, and so I do those things until I can finally escape, claiming too much tequila and an early morning, both of which are true. Before anyone can suggest we move the party somewhere else, or Everett can try to get in a cab with me, or Jess can comment on anything besides her recent travels or the weather, I gather my coat and my things and fold myself into the taxi line.

The taxi driver pulls up in front of my apartment twenty minutes later, and I step onto the sidewalk. I wait until he's pulled away down the block, and then I lean over the curb and throw up in the street.

The next morning I wake up, feeling properly spanked by the tequila, with a new e-mail winking at me from my in-box.

The e-mail is straightforward, and expected; it's from Jess, and she would really like to see me when we have time and space to talk, and could I come and visit her in her Brooklyn loft sometime next week. I can hear the last sentence in her voice, as if she's standing right next to me in my apartment, speaking out loud: “I can't wait to hear what you've been working on.”

June, the year before

Matthew turned five amid much pomp and circumstance. There had been a rash of spring birthdays among his classmates, and it seemed like every party had tried its damnedest to outdo the last. As a result, Gretchen had spent the previous month grumbling about zoo animals and karate workshops, feeling misunderstood by Scotty, who went back and forth between disdainful mockery and straight laughter. I find the Manhattan kid-party culture baffling. I suggested giving the kids a refrigerator box and some chalk, and then letting them eat frosting out of a can, but I don't think anyone took me seriously.

Gretchen finally decided on the Museum of Natural History, and if I thought that I'd gotten used to the whole money thing, made my peace with it, and even come to a point where I barely noticed it, the fact that they've shut down the Hall of Ocean Life (known to lay folk as the Whale Room) to everyone except Matt's guests gives me a whack on the head to remind me.

“Charlotte, you're our guest,” Gretchen keeps saying as she whizzes by me, back and forth, this time to greet Jillian and her husband, who might as well be David and Victoria Beckham. Aaron and Ainsley are dressed in coordinated, nautically themed outfits.

“I'm having fun,” I call back to her, as I pry a metal skewer, formerly bearing teriyaki chicken, out of George's hand. He didn't eat the chicken, of course—he flung it off the skewer in an impressive trajectory, and now it's hanging out in some dark corner, where it will likely attract vermin or be consumed by another toddler.

“Awfully dark in here,” says a voice from behind me, as I am approaching the buffet. I find a utensil and start forking the chicken off the skewers and into the chafing dish. Who brings metal skewers to a five-year-old's birthday party?

“Hey, she's hot. What's her deal?” Patrick points to Jillian.

“That's her husband—the guy who looks like Colin Farrell—and those are her twins, the J. Crew baby models,” I say. “You literally,
literally
, asked me the same question at Matt's party last year.”

“I know,” he says. “I wanted you to turn around.”

“Didn't you bring a date to keep you occupied? She might appreciate the dark,” I check underneath all the serving dishes to make sure no open flames are peeking out.

“Maybe,” he says. “Were you asking about me?”

“If I angled my body a little to the left, I'm sure I could stab you in the arm with one of these skewers and make it look like an accident,” I say.

“Aha. Open hostility. I guess I really did hurt your feelings last time we saw each other.”

“There is nothing you could do that would hurt my feelings, Patrick,” I say, and I'm pretty sure I mean it. “But showing up drunk at your brother's house, where young children are asleep in the other room, and refusing to leave, even though your brother is out and the babysitter is there, that's kind of high on my list of creepy things to do.”

“You didn't tell him, though.”

“You asked me not to!”

“If you thought it was that creepy, you probably should have told them.”

“I didn't see the point.” I move the silverware back a few inches from the edge of the table. “They would have felt bad about it, even though it wasn't any fault of theirs, and then things would have been uncomfortable. They don't need that on them.”

“So you decided to keep it for yourself?”

I frown at him with my full attention. “That's a weird way to put it, dude.”

“I was in a bad place,” he says.

“Because you cheated on your girlfriend.”

“Once! Well, three times if you're counting the instances. But it was only one night.” Patrick stacks up a bunch of used clear plastic cups and tosses them into the trash bin at the end of the table.

“With your brother's secretary.”

“Charlotte, you do have a head for details.”

“Gross,” I say.

“What?”

“Nothing. Belatedly from the three-times thing,” I say. I'm tempted to pile the mini corn muffins into a pyramid.

“If you quit, Scotty will kill me.”

“I would never quit over you,” I say, with as much scorn as I can muster. “I really didn't give it a second thought.” I did give it a second thought, actually, but only a second. I refused to give it a third or fourth or anything beyond. “You can put it out of your head. We never had that conversation.” I feel two little hands encircling my knee, and I reach down to ruffle George's hair. “Hi, buddy.”

“Tahr-lette, you bring your guitar?”

“I brought my ukulele,” I say.

George leans against my leg. He looks like he's reached his wilding limit for the day and would like to go home. We've got at least another hour to go. “You bring that widdle guitar?”

“Yes, the little one. It's called a ukulele.”

“Me hold that widdle guitar?” Things I bring from my house are like catnip to him. It doesn't matter what it is—a library card, a flashlight, a ponytail holder—if it comes from my house, it's special.

“I know you know how to be gentle,” I say to George. “But if I let
you
hold it, then everyone will want a turn, and it might get broken.”

“You sing a song with that?”

“Sure,” I say. “I guess so. Which song?”

“That hammer song?”

I lead George over next to the sea otter diorama to sit down, and I notice that Patrick has migrated with us. “If you're joining us, you'll have to lend your voice. George will be Peter. I'll be Paul. You can be Mary.” I start to strum up the intro, keeping it on the quiet side, and I'm surprised and kind of laughing through the whole song, because Patrick knows all the words and can hold his part against my harmony, even in the high falsetto he has adopted in his interpretation of Mary.

“Mary's voice is much lower than that,” I say to Patrick. “You ought to get up to scratch on your fight-the-man protest songs.”

“Make me a playlist,” he says. I start to segue into “We Shall Overcome” on my ukulele, and he smacks the floor between us. “I could harmonize this one six different ways. I heard it coming out of Zuccotti Park every time I opened my office window last year.” By the time I get into the second verse, Matt's little buddy Sahina has approached and is kneeling very close, with her hands on my knee, joining in at the top of her lungs when I get to the closing phrase. After I finish with all the words I know of that one (I might have made up a few of them), I go into “This Little Light of Mine,” and by that time Matt has run up, with Ainsley, Little L, three boys whose names I can't remember, and a bunch of toddlers in tow.

“I know all the words because we sing this one in my Sunday school,” says Little L, in a not-cute-but-prissy way. I feel sorry for her. Her life is going to be hard, in the emotional sense.

We finish the song, and I'd like to be done because several of the adults have started to hover on the perimeter of our little cluster, but the birthday boy has a request.

“That one about the flower,” Matt says, referring to a song that I like to butcher the lyrics to, Weird Al–style, every time it comes on our Pandora station.

“The geranium?” I say. The majority of the party is looking on now, but I don't want to refuse a birthday request.

“Yeah! I teached that one on the playground,” he says.

“You
taught
it,” I correct him automatically. “Does that mean that you guys all know the words?”

“Yeah!” say several little voices, the first and most emphatic being Little L.

“Well, okay then. Here we go,” I say. Patrick sits up straighter, like he's ready for more. Gretchen is standing to one side, poking Scotty in the ribs while he holds up his phone to record this for what I'm sure will be many instances of future Charlotte humiliation at McLean family gatherings. Electronic pop is tricky on a ukulele, but I manage, and when we get to the chorus, all the kids join in. We finish up to laughter and applause, and Matt is grinning as he runs away with his friends, still singing at the top of his lungs, which I'm sure must be thrilling to the museum-party leaders.

“You're their babysitter, right? Or did they hire you for the party?”

I look up, and it's Jillian's husband standing in front of me with Aaron, Ainsley's twin brother. I get to my feet and hand the ukulele to George, who gives me a very smug I-knew-I-could-bend-you-to-my-will look.

“No. Yes, I'm the babysitter, I mean,” I say. “Matt's brother was getting antsy, so we decided to improvise a little. I'm Charlotte.”

“Casey,” he says, shaking my hand. “Interesting material. I'll bet you have to have a lot of that stuff in your arsenal, huh?”

“It's just messing around. The boys and I do it together.” I want to dismiss this topic of conversation before it can go anywhere near my musical background.

“Well, with two little boys running you around all the time, I'm sure you need to sit down and catch a break, sing a song every once in a while,” he says. “I get my cardio in and then some, and we only have one boy. Luckily, Ainsley would rather sit me down in front of Barbie's dream house, so Dad gets a break. But I would love it if Aaron took up a hobby that required him to stand still for a few minutes. I tried to get him started on
World of Warcraft
, but Jill wouldn't hear of it.”