Beautiful Day (4 page)

Jenna had brought it to dinner at Locanda Verde. Doug remembered her setting it on
the table next to the platter of crostini with house-made herbed ricotta. He remembered
Jenna saying, “There’s a cheat sheet in here, Daddy, an index card with the names
of all of Mom’s cousins and their spouses and children. I memorized it, and you should,
too.”

“Sure,” Doug had said automatically. He then wondered what it would be like to see
Beth’s cousins, people he hadn’t seen since the funeral. He was grateful when conversation
turned to another topic.

If the wine had gone to her head, Jenna might have left the Notebook at the restaurant.
But she
hadn’t
left it at the restaurant. It had ended up here.

How, though? He certainly hadn’t carried it out.

So there was only one answer: Pauline had taken the Notebook and brought it home.
However, Doug didn’t remember Jenna offering to show the Notebook to Pauline, nor
did he remember Pauline asking to see the Notebook. If that had happened, he would
have remembered. Pauline was jealous of the Notebook, which really meant that Pauline
was jealous of Beth. Beth, who had been dead seven years, who had died in a matter
of months under excruciatingly painful circumstances, leaving behind the family she’d
loved more than anything. How could Pauline be jealous of Beth? How could she begrudge
Jenna a
missive filled with motherly love and advice? Well, Pauline hadn’t been granted access
to the Notebook, a fact that bugged the shit out of her, but as Doug pointed out,
the Notebook was private. It was Jenna’s choice to share it or not share it. Pauline
was further bothered because she had offered to take Jenna shopping for a wedding
dress and Jenna had informed Pauline that she would be wearing Beth’s dress (per the
Notebook). Pauline had suggested calla lilies in the bridal bouquet; Jenna was going
with limelight hydrangeas and tight white peonies (per the Notebook). Pauline had
wanted herself and Doug listed on the invitation by name, but Jenna had gone with
this wording:
Jennifer Bailey Carmichael and Stuart James Graham, along with their families, invite
you to share in the celebration of their wedding
(per the Notebook).

Doug had gently advised Pauline to back off where the wedding was concerned. Pauline
had a daughter of her own. When it was Rhonda’s turn to get married, Pauline could
interfere all she wanted.

“When Rhonda gets married?” Pauline had exclaimed.

“Yes,” Doug said.

“She’ll never get married!” Pauline said. “She’s never had a relationship last more
than six weeks.”

This was true. Rhonda had pretty, dark hair like her mother, and she was very thin.
Too thin, if you asked Doug. She spent something like five hours a day at the gym.
Going to the gym was Rhonda’s
job,
and freelance graphic design was a hobby from which she received the occasional paycheck.
She was thirty-eight years old, and Arthur Tonelli still paid her rent and gave her
an allowance. At thirty-eight! The reason Rhonda’s relationships didn’t last was because
she was impossible to please. She was negative, dour, and unpleasant. She never smiled.
The reason Rhonda worked freelance was because she’d lost her last three office jobs
due to “problems cooperating with coworkers” and “insufficient interpersonal skills
with clients.” Which meant: no one liked her. Except, of course, for Pauline. Mother
and daughter were best friends. They told each other everything; there was
absolutely no filter.
This fact alone made Doug uncomfortable around Rhonda. He was sure that Rhonda knew
how frequently he and Pauline made love (lately about once a month), as well as the
results of his prostate exam and the cost of his bridgework.

Pauline was right: Rhonda would never get married. Pauline would never become a grandmother.
And so could Doug really blame her for clinging to his family with such desperation?

Pauline burst into the bedroom, and Doug sat straight up in bed. He had fallen asleep;
his mouth was cottony and still tasted faintly of peanut butter.

“Hi,” he said.

“Were you
sleeping?
” she asked. She was wearing her tennis clothes but had removed her shoes and socks,
and so Doug smelled, or imagined he could smell, her feet.

“I took a nap,” he said. “I was tired, and I thought it would be a good idea, considering
the drive.” Doug studied his wife. She was an ample woman with large breasts and wide
hips; she was the despondent possessor of what she called a “muffin top,” which kept
her constantly dieting. Food wasn’t just food with Pauline; it was a daily challenge.
She always started off well—power walking along the Silvermine River with two other
women from the neighborhood and coming home to eat a bowl of yogurt with berries.
But then there was a thick sandwich with fries at the country club, followed by the
two pieces of pound cake she ate at book group, and not only would Doug have to hear
about it when he got home from work, but he would have to share in
Pauline’s punishment: a dinner that consisted of grilled green beans and eggplant
or a bowl of Special K.

Beth had been such a good cook. Doug would kill to taste her creamy mac and cheese
or her pan-fried pork chops smothered with mushroom sauce. But he didn’t like to compare.

He was glad to see Pauline had actually gone to play tennis. Her dark hair was in
a ponytail, and her forehead had a sheen of sweat that gave her a certain glow. The
short, pleated skirt showed off her legs, which were her best feature. Sometimes Pauline
went to the club to “play tennis,” but the courts would be booked, so instead she
would sit at the bar with Christine Potter and Alice Quincy and drink chardonnay for
two hours, and Pauline would come home feeling combative.

Pauline was a prodigious drinker of chardonnay. Doug remembered that during the divorce
proceedings, Arthur had referred to her as “the wino.” Doug had found that mean and
unnecessary at the time, but he realized now that Arthur had not been complaining
for no reason.

“How was tennis?” Doug asked.

“Fine,” Pauline said. “It felt good to work out some of my anxiety.”

Anxiety?
Doug thought. He knew an attentive husband would ask about the source of his wife’s
anxiety, but Doug didn’t want to ask. Then he realized that Pauline had anxiety about
the upcoming weekend. He remembered the Notebook, now safely tucked into his suitcase.

He swung his feet to the floor and loosened his tie. “Pauline,” he said.

She pulled her top off over her head and unhooked her sturdy white bra. Her breasts
were set free. Had they always hung so low, he wondered?

“I’m going to shower,” she said. “And then I have to finish packing. We’re having
lamb chops for dinner.” She wriggled out of her skirt and underwear. She stood before
him naked. Pauline was not an unlovely woman; if he touched her, he knew her skin
would be soft and smooth and warm. Once upon a time, Doug had been very attracted
to Pauline; their lovemaking had always been a strong point between them. He allowed
himself to think about having wild, ravishing sex right now, maybe up against the
closet door. He willed himself to feel a stir of arousal. He envisioned his mouth
on Pauline’s neck, her hand down his pants.

Nothing.

This was not good.

“Pauline.”

She turned to face him, panicked. She sensed, maybe, that he was after sex—which she
explicitly did not allow during daylight hours.

“What?” she said.

“Did you take the Notebook from the restaurant last night?”

“What notebook?”

Doug closed his eyes, wishing she hadn’t just said that. He lowered his voice, the
way he would have for a hostile witness or a client who insisted on lying to him despite
the fact that he had been hired to help.

“You know which notebook.”

Pauline’s forehead wrinkled and her eyes widened, and she did, at that moment, resemble
Rhonda very strongly, which did not improve her case. “You mean the green notebook?
Jenna’s notebook?”

“Yes,” Doug said. “Jenna’s notebook. I found it downstairs. Did you take it?” The
question was ridiculous—of course she’d taken it—but Doug wanted to hear her admit
to it.

“Why are you being so weird?”she asked.

“Define ‘weird,’ ” he said.

“ ‘Define weird.’ Don’t harass me, counselor. Save it for the courtroom.” Pauline
took a step toward the bathroom, but Doug wasn’t going to let her escape. He stood
up.

“Pauline.”

“I need to get in the shower,” she said. “I’m not going to stand around
naked
while you
accuse
me of things.”

Doug followed Pauline to the bathroom. He stood in the doorway as she turned on the
water. This was the master bath she had shared with Arthur Tonelli for over twenty
years. Pauline and Arthur had built this house together; they had picked out the tile
and the sink and the fixtures. For the first few years of their marriage, Doug had
felt like an impostor in this bathroom. What was he doing using Arthur Tonelli’s bathroom?
What was he doing sleeping with Arthur Tonelli’s wife? But by now Doug had grown used
to it. He and Beth had renovated their 1836 colonial on the Post Road until it was
exactly to their taste, but after Beth died, it occurred to Doug that material things—even
entire rooms—held no meaning. A bathroom was a bathroom was a bathroom.

“Did you take the Notebook?” Doug asked.

Pauline tested the water with her hand. She did not answer.

“Pauline…”

She whipped around. “Yes,” she said. “Jenna left it on the table at the restaurant
last night and I picked it up.” She widened her brown eyes at him. When they’d first
met, her eyes had reminded Doug of chocolate candy. “I
rescued
the Notebook. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to take a shower. In peace.”

“No,” Doug said. “I will not excuse you. Why didn’t you give it back to Jenna? What
is it doing here?”

“She was in a hurry, remember? She and Stuart raced away in that cab.”

What Doug remembered was standing out on Greenwich Avenue trying to hail Jenna and
Stuart a cab, but having no luck. That far downtown, cabs were impossible to find.
What Doug remembered was considering asking the maître d’ to call a car service for
the kids, but then at the last moment a cab appeared, and Jenna and Stuart hopped
in it. But there had been a full ten minutes, maybe longer, with the four of them
outside on the sidewalk. And Pauline had had the Notebook; she had probably stuffed
it into one of the enormous purses she liked to carry.

“She wasn’t in a hurry,” Doug said. “We waited around for goddamned ever for that
cab. I’m not wrong about that, am I?”

“I forgot to give it back to her,” Pauline said. “I meant to, but then we were so
caught up in trying to get them a cab, I forgot.”

“You forgot?” Doug said.

“Yes.”

“Really?”

Pauline nodded once, with conviction. That was her story and she was sticking to it.
As Arthur Tonelli’s bathroom filled with steam, Doug realized something. He realized
that he did not love Pauline. It was possible that he had never loved Pauline. On
Monday, once the wedding was over and they were safely back home, he was going to
ask Pauline for a divorce.

He turned and walked out. It felt good to have made that decision.

Pauline must have sensed something dire because she shut off the water, wrapped herself
in a towel, and followed him out.

“I need you to believe me,” she said.

Doug watched her clutch the towel to her chest. Her thick, dark hair, out of its ponytail,
fell in damp ropes over her shoulders.

“I do believe you,” he said.

“You do?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’ve presented a plausible argument. Jenna left behind the Notebook,
you wisely scooped it up, and amidst all the brouhaha of trying to flag a taxi, you
forgot to return it to her.”

Pauline exhaled. “Yes.”

“My question now is, did you read it?”

As Pauline stared at him, he watched conflicting emotions cross her face. He was an
attorney; he dealt every day with people who wanted to lie to him.

“Yes,” she admitted. “I read it.”

“You read it.” He had no reason to be surprised, but he was anyway.

“It was driving me crazy,” Pauline said. “The Notebook this, the Notebook that, what
‘Mom’ wrote in the Notebook. Your daughters—and you, too, Douglas—treated the thing
like the fifth gospel. Jenna wouldn’t accept one suggestion—
not one
—from me. She only wanted to follow what was in the goddamned Notebook. And I wanted
to see exactly what that was. I wanted to see what Beth had to say.”

Doug didn’t like hearing his second wife speak his first wife’s name. This had always
been true.

“So you read it?” Doug said. “You read it today? While I was at work?”

“Yes,” Pauline said. “And I have to say, Beth covered all the bases. She let Jenna
know exactly what she wanted—down to the pattern of the silver, down to the song you
and Jenna should dance to, down to the earrings Jenna should wear with ‘the dress.’
It was the most blatant exercise in mind control I have ever seen. Beth planned her
own
wedding. She didn’t leave anything for Jenna to decide.”

Doug wondered if Pauline had read the last page. He wondered what the last page said.

“I think those were meant to be suggestions,” Doug said, feeling defensive.

“
Suggestions?
” Pauline said. “Beth flat-out
told
Jenna what to do.”

“Jenna is a strong person,” Doug said. “If she had disagreed with something Beth wrote,
she would have changed it.”

“And go against the wishes of her dead mother?” Pauline said. “Never.”

“Hey now,” Doug said. “That’s out of line.”

“I offered to take Jenna out to try on wedding dresses,” Pauline said. “To try them
on, that was all, to see what else was out there, to see if there was anything that
suited her better than Beth’s dress—and she wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t even
try.
”