Promises to Keep (4 page)

Photography has always been something that Callie has loved. As a little girl, she would grab her mother’s camera and snap away at people. It was clear, even then, that she had an eye.

Without any sort of training, she instinctively knew how to frame a shot, and one fine art degree plus several photographic courses later, she had learned about shutter speeds, apertures, lighting, developing.

For a while, after Eliza was born, she devoted herself to being a full-time mother. They were living in the city at the time, on the Upper East Side, having left the apartment in Chelsea, and she would push Eliza in a buggy back and forth to Central Park, weaving through the nannies in a desperate attempt to find another mother, to find a friend.

They moved to Bedford for more space, and Callie jumped straight into playgroups and preschool volunteering, figuring that was what you were supposed to do when you were a full-time mother, that this was now her job, and one she would take seriously.

But she could never put down the camera. It was always in her bag, and she captured every change in Eliza and Jack’s life. When the kids were in school, or on playdates, or there were other children around, she captured them too, and people quickly started to ask her for shots, then offered to pay her for formal shoots.

The thing was, Callie didn’t like formal shoots. She didn’t like anything posed, preferring to get to know her subjects, even if only a little, and to hover in the background and snap discreetly. She liked catching the true essence of a child, and, as time went by, of their families too.

Soon the wealthiest people in Bedford had huge, grainy, black and white Callie Perry prints of their families hanging on either side of the imposing stone fireplace in the drawing room.

“Who did those?” guests would inquire enviously. “They’re stunning.”

And Callie’s business took off.

It is, she often thinks, the perfect job. She is at home for the kids whenever they are home, and yet has something that is wholly hers. She loves the excitement of downloading the pictures onto her computer, of scrolling through to pick the perfect shots, and of changing the shadows, the saturation, the exposure to make each one even more perfect than it already is.

There was always something so meditative for her about exposing photographs the old-fashioned way, in a darkroom. About holding the sheet of paper between the tweezers and moving it gently through the chemicals, watching the image slowly appear, holding your breath with anticipation and excitement because you were never sure how it was going to come out.

And yet, although it isn’t the same, she is surprised at how much she loves Photoshop, how much she loves the extent to which you can change a picture, improve it, correct mistakes with just the click of a mouse.

If only it were this easy with husbands. She picks up the phone to call Reece, but remembers suddenly that he is traveling, and she puts it down with a sigh. She thinks back to when they first met; his job was smaller then, and, although he was already traveling, when he wasn’t away on business he would come home early from the office, would have dinner with her. But then the opportunity to shoot the car ads in South Africa came up and it was a huge career jump, far too good to turn down, bringing with it more travel, and later nights.

O
n nights like these, when Steffi has been working all day, and the restaurant has been packed, and she’s barely had a chance to take a break, the last thing she wants to do is skid down the slippery stairs to a dank basement nightclub to watch Rob play a gig, but sometimes a girlfriend has to do what a girlfriend has to do.

Ordinarily she’d go out with the rest of the gang from the restaurant. Maybe to one of the neighboring bars, or to someone else’s restaurant where they’d close for the night and there’d be just staff and their friends sitting around, blowing off steam, wandering outside for the odd toke on a joint.

Or back to the apartment she now shared with Rob. Moving in with him was less an indication of the seriousness of their relationship and more that it was cheap and convenient; neither of them was under any illusion that this would be a leg up to the next level of their relationship.

But when Rob’s band has a gig she knows she has to go for support, because he expects it, and also, frankly, to make sure the young girls who follow the band around from club to club know that Rob is very definitely not available.

She checks her watch. Ten-fifteen. They were supposed to go on at nine, but experience tells her they’ll stall until ten-thirty, to give the audience time to build up a frenzy of anticipation. Steffi locks up the restaurant, inhaling sharply at the biting cold, then clutches her down jacket tighter and prays there is a cab nearby.

Usually she’d walk, but October in New York City can be vicious, and this is one of those nights when the wind chill takes the temperature down to a level that makes it clear that although winter is not yet here officially, it is definitely on its way. No one is outside unless they have to be. On the Upper East Side, the soignée women who are usually insulated in fur throughout the winter are already covering their faces with fleece balaclavas and giant ear muffs, trying not to expose an inch of flesh during their walk from their limousine to the waiting doorman.

 

Leaning back against the seat as the cab jerks and lurches through every pothole on the Lower East Side, Steffi closes her eyes with a small smile and thinks about how lucky she is.

She may be sweaty, and tired, and dirty, and she may be off to watch a band she secretly doesn’t think is all that good, but the one thing she’s certain of is that she loves her life.

Her twenties were wild—all the partying, the craziness, the constant whirlwind of not knowing what was next—but there was always a feeling that she hadn’t found her place in the world, didn’t know who she was supposed to be; she never felt settled back then.

Perhaps you are not supposed to, in your twenties, but Steffi always suspected that something would shift for her when she turned thirty. Callie, her older sister, had hated turning thirty all those years ago. She had phoned Steffi in tears, sobbing that she had no boyfriend, not a hope of marriage, nor of children, and thirty was the beginning of the end.

Nine years younger, Steffi had no idea what to say. Although she wasn’t the slightest bit surprised that Callie met Reece just a few weeks later, and by the time she was thirty-one Callie was married, and a couple of years after that she had Eliza, her beloved baby daughter.

Steffi celebrated her thirtieth birthday on the ski slopes of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, giggling with her then-boyfriend, Bob, as they got drunk at the top of Corbet’s Couloir, and somehow managed to make their way down.

Bob looked like a snow bum, which he was, but he also owned hundreds of acres of land in South America, where he grew roses for export to America, earning vast amounts of money in the process, hence his ability to stay in Jackson Hole for weeks at a time.

He looked and talked like a Californian surfer dude, and had adopted yoga and veganism several years earlier. Shortly after they met he urged Steffi to try vegan food, horrified at her penchant for meat, and spare ribs in particular. She wasn’t convinced, but agreed she would do it for a couple of weeks, just to see what it was like.

She loved it. Instantly. She loved feeling clean and light. She used to say it felt as if her body didn’t have to try in order to digest, and the benefits were huge. She honestly didn’t think it would be something she would stick to, but after the two weeks she knew that her meat-eating days were over.

Always a keen cook, she started cooking foods with which she had only had a passing acquaintance before turning vegan: tofu, tempeh, quinoa, wheat berry. She would sit for hours and devise menus, making sure they had the right balance of leafy greens, protein, omega-3s.

Her skin looked great, her body—always tending to the chubby side—seemed to find its natural weight without her even trying, and she became passionate about vegan cooking.

Bob looked at her one night after finishing a spinach and chickpea curry.

“You’re really good at this,” he said. “You ought to do it for a living.”

Steffi laughed. “You mean, give up my wonderful job as receptionist extraordinaire?”

“You’re only doing that because you haven’t found your path,” Bob said. “That’s just killing time. And yes, I do mean give that up. If you follow your passion you’ll be happy, and I can see that this is it.”

“What? Food?”

“Yes, but you’re talented. You’re always creating these amazing dishes, and I know you’re not just following recipes. Half the time you’re not using a recipe, you’re just making it up. I’ve seen you scribbling notes when you get an idea. You should be a chef.”

It was one of those lightbulb moments, Steffi realized afterward. As soon as he said the words, she knew that it was exactly what she wanted to do, indeed, what she had been destined to do.

She came back from Jackson Hole and Bob paid for her to enroll in a course at the Culinary Institute of America. It was the greatest thing he ever did for her, and in many ways more than made up for the fact that he left her for a nineteen-year-old Brazilian beauty shortly thereafter.

And now she works at Joni’s, a hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant tucked between a laundromat and a pawn shop on Twelfth Street. It isn’t exactly salubrious, but their reputation is such that it has become a destination, and every night there is a long line of people patiently waiting with bottles of wine in hand.

Even Walter, Steffi’s dad, liked it, grudgingly admitting that perhaps he had been wrong about his daughter’s “latest crazy decision” to become a chef.

She couldn’t really blame him; after all, he had been witness to every incarnation throughout her twenties, rolling his eyes each time and asking her when she was going to get a proper job.

“You don’t understand,” she’d say. “It isn’t about pensions and security anymore. No one wants that, Dad. And even if they did, companies aren’t offering it. Life isn’t the way it used to be.”

“Well some things haven’t changed,” her dad would say. “I notice you still come to me every time you need money.”

“Fine,” she would huff. “I didn’t realize it was a problem. I won’t come to you anymore.” And she wouldn’t. For a while.

Her mother was more understanding. An artist herself, she had always encouraged Steffi to follow a creative path. When Steffi dropped out of Emory—she was far too busy partying and having fun to bother with work—her mother, while not quite actively encouraging it, said that she had never thought Steffi would thrive in an academic environment.

Her father, on the other hand, had almost had heart failure. There were only two things Steffi could do that would make him happy: work at a bank or insurance company, with a steady salary and a medical plan, or find a wealthy husband to take care of her. Given that she had been fired from every desk job she had ever attempted, and given her penchant for actors, musicians and writers, it was looking increasingly unlikely she would be able to make her father happy.

“When are you going to grow up?” he shouted a couple of times.

“You will find out what you are here for,” her mother said, and gently smiled. “It just may take you a little longer to find out, but that’s okay. It took me a little longer too.”

Steffi still cannot believe her mother and father had once been married. She doesn’t remember a time when they were ever together. She was barely a toddler when they split up, but spent her entire childhood dreaming of them remarrying, even though, for years, they quite clearly hated each other.

Now of course, as an adult, she has asked her mother.

“Tell me again why you married him?”

“I was young, he was handsome. I thought it would make my mother happy.”

“Did it?”

“Of course. To marry a Tollemache? My mother was over the moon.” Honor’s eyes clouded over as she remembered.

“And they didn’t care about what you wanted?”

“Things were different in those days.” Her mother smiled. “You married for a variety of reasons, and true love was rarely one of them.”

“So you didn’t love him?”

“Oh I did,” Honor said carefully. “Your father is a good man. I absolutely loved him, but we were such different people. Truly, we should never have married each other.”

Her father still refuses to talk about her mother, unless it’s a sarcastic dig. You would think, considering he has married twice more since then, not to mention having had a long-term live-in lover too, that he would have moved on, but he has never seemed able to let go of the anger. Callie has theorized that it is because their mother humiliated him by leaving him so unexpectedly.

And yet, when Honor’s second husband, the man she described as the love of her life, died eight years ago, Walter wrote her a long letter, expressing his sorrow, and his regret that he hadn’t been able to find the sort of happiness she had had.