Best Intentions (31 page)

“I meant under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances are those?”

“Surely you must know. It's all over the papers today.”

“What is?”

“I just assumed, seeing as he is such a good friend of yours.” She turns and walks to the mantel while the other women watch in utter silence, hanging on her very move.

“Didn't you see the
Post
?” she asks, handing me the tabloid folded to page three.

“We don't get the
Post,
” I tell her. Sam reads the business column online and I have no interest in the gossip pages, where Georgia and her friends turn up on a regular basis, tabulating each other's mentions like baseball scores.

“Well, I'm sure you'll be interested in this.”

I look at her and then glance down at the paper.

I let the paper fall to my side, aware of all the eyes trained on me.

No one makes a move.

Beneath Georgia's expression of faux concern, I detect a note of triumph.

Only Tara Jamison steps forward to break the silence, resting her hand gently on my shoulder. “I'm sorry,” she murmurs quietly. “Did you know her?”

“She was my best friend,” I say.

D
usk settles outside the enormous hand-blown windows of the nineteenth-century Meeting House. Inside, the dusty scent of old wood and services gone by fills the unadorned room with a sense of calm.

Sam, Phoebe, Claire and I sit a few rows back, watching as the simple white pews fill with the men and women who populated Deirdre's life. There are the familiar faces of those she was close to and people I've been at parties with over the years whose names I've long forgotten, an aunt I never met, customers from the store, other single women, her weekend women, Deirdre sometimes called them affectionately, gym buddies, men I vaguely recall her dating, acquaintances from other eras and other neighborhoods, all witnesses to a Manhattan life, compartmentalized and varied and so rarely gathered in one room.

Only Ben and Jack are missing.

Sam and I debated about whether to bring the girls but finally decided in favor of it. They deserve to be included in whatever comfort ritual can bring. I look over at them sitting solemnly by my side, stone-faced, uncertain what to expect or how, precisely, to behave, at once so grown up and so achingly young. I touch them both reassuringly. I told them that there would be sadness in the room tonight, and perhaps tears, but that we were gathering to celebrate Deirdre's
life and there should be joy as well. I try to remember that myself as the last people filter in and the doors close behind them.

It is just after six p.m. when the man I had first spoken with about the service walks to the center of the room. Slightly stooped, with thinning hair and a graying goatee, a tweed blazer and wide-wale corduroy pants, he clears his throat and begins to speak in a gravelly voice, his pronounced Adam's apple bouncing up and down.

“Hi. I'm Tom Madison from the Society of Friends. We are honored that you chose to remember Deirdre Cushing here with us tonight. For those of you who have never been to a Quaker service, I'd like to give you a brief introduction. At our Meeting, we practice what we call ‘unprogrammed worship.' Instead of proscribed ceremonies, we believe that the Spirit of God lies in each of us. Anyone may speak up when they are moved to do so. I invite you to rise and share a memory or thought about Deirdre whenever you feel the Spirit.”

Tom Madison's crinkly eyes roam the room before he sits down without further ado.

A thick, self-conscious silence descends as people stare at their hands resting in their laps, glancing surreptitiously about, shifting positions as discreetly as possible. Outside a car alarm sounds in the distance, then stops.

No one wants to go first.

I feel vaguely responsible, as if I am the hostess of a party in the midst of flopping, one of those interminable events that never quite establishes a rhythm.

My leg begins to fall asleep.

Someone's stomach grumbles.

I sneak a look at my watch. Eleven minutes of absolute silence have gone by.

I hear a rustling and look over to see Janine rising shakily a few feet away, resting her hands on the pew in front of her to steady herself. Her voice quakes as she begins, is stopped by nerves, begins again. I want to go up and kiss her, I am so grateful.

Everyone in the room glances at her hopefully.

“Okay, um, I'm not sure if this is the kind of thing, all right, anyway,” she stutters, then steels herself. “Deirdre was the most stylish woman I ever met. I mean, you all know that. She was my role model. Totally. I always thought she could do anything. Except for one thing: drive.”

Groans and laughs of recognition go up around the room, encouraging Janine to continue.

“As many of you know, Deirdre didn't get her license until she was thirty and she never really drove anywhere after that. She was the only person I know who sent Christmas cards to every single cabbie in the Hamptons. Anyway, last year she decided she had to get over her fear and she hired this guy, Sammy, to give her lessons. Every Wednesday afternoon, Sammy would pull up in front of the store, Deirdre would get in and they would take off at about three miles an hour.

“She did fine the first few weeks when they tooled around Manhattan,” Janine goes on, “but when Sammy told her he was going to take her on the FDR Drive the next week she totally panicked. I've never seen anyone so nervous. Of course, she canceled and never drove again. You know what she said to me? She said she decided she didn't have to conquer all of her fears, just some of them.” Janine chokes up, collects herself. “The thing is, I thought it was really glamorous of her not to drive. I mean, I didn't know people like her growing up in Ohio.” She looks nervously around the room and sits down.

The silence returns but it is more companionable now, filled with recollections instead of awkwardness.

Elaina, one of Deirdre's fellow single friends, stands up next. “I don't know if it was one of her fears but one thing I'm sure of is how much Deirdre hated to be bored. She'd do anything to avoid it. One time when she was in between boyfriends, she sent the exact same note to eighty-seven guys in one fell swoop on Match. Seriously. I'm not exaggerating. She said she wanted to shake her life up. I can't remember if she actually read each guy's profile or if she chose them
randomly. I think she figured her odds were pretty much the same either way. The thing that gets me is that when they kicked her off the Web site she wrote this indignant letter saying they had no right to judge how many potential soul mates she had.”

The stories pile up, the armful of dresses brought over unbidden to a friend recovering from pneumonia, the time she passed out on MacDougal Street on the fourth day of a diet that consisted of six plums a day, the way she still took books out of the public library because she liked the way they smelled. Some speak of her love of children, her penchant for roaming the Metropolitan Museum for hours whenever she was sad or confused or needed to clear her head, her dedication to a charity that donated business clothes to homeless women to wear on job interviews, her independence. Most of all they talk of her humor and her deep, essential kindness.

I gather these stories in, hold them tight, those I know and those I don't, I savor them all. But I do not rise to speak, fearful that if I try, my knees will buckle beneath me. In some ways, tonight, in this soaring room with its closed doors and its mourners, is the first time I have come close to believing that Deirdre is truly gone and no amount of wishing or magical thinking will alter that finality. It leaves me faint.

I will never see most of these people again.

The city will continue to whirl around us, rending us apart, uniting us, treating us to chance encounters and unexpected heartbreak. It is Deirdre who carried Manhattan and all its heady promise with her to that upstate campus where we first met, Deirdre who gave me both the confidence to come here and the will to stay. It was her lasting gift to me.

Tom Madison reaches to shake hands with the person on his left and then his right, signaling that the Meeting is over.

As we file out into the courtyard Sam asks the girls where they would like to go for dinner. Except for a late-afternoon snack, none of us has eaten.

“Posto,” Phoebe proclaims, her favorite spot for thin-crust pizza and lemonade you mix yourself with liquid cane sugar.

For once, the girls don't squabble and we head out onto Rutherford Place, where the trees of Stuyvesant Park are outlined against the darkening night, its stone fountains turned off for the season. We are a few feet past the Meeting House gates when I hear someone call my name.

I turn to see a woman I noticed sitting in the back pew hurrying up to me. She looks vaguely familiar but I can't quite place her.

“Lisa?”

“Yes?”

“I'm Alice. Alice Handel.” She is thinner than I remember, her pretty, once round face now anxious and distraught. She reaches for my forearm. “I need to talk to you.”

A
lice, of course.” It has been five years since I last saw her at her wedding to Jack on a sultry Cape Cod summer night, Alice in a simple deep V-neck satin gown that floated from her slim figure, her blond hair loose, tendrily, her face glowing, that's how I remember it, all that freshness, all that shimmer. The woman before me is still lovely, but a palpable weariness has dimmed her complexion, painted shadows where none had been.

“Please, it's important,” she insists, holding on to my arm.

Sam, who has been watching from two feet away, steps forward. “Go ahead,” he says. “I'll take the girls to dinner.”

I look at him and nod, not at all sure what I am getting myself into.

Alice watches impatiently while I kiss Sam and the girls good-bye, telling them I will meet them at home.

It is only when they have begun to walk off that I turn my attention back to Alice.

“Is Jack here with you?” I ask.

“No, I came alone. He doesn't know I'm here. Is there someplace we can go? Someplace private? Please.”

“Of course. My apartment is a few blocks away. Why don't we go there?”

“Yes, fine.”

As I lead the way, Alice walks quickly, her head down. We speak little. Whatever she so desperately needs to talk to me about consumes every ounce of her concentration, it is all she has.

We ride up in the elevator in silence.

Once inside, I turn on the lights.

“Can I take your coat?” I ask as I slip out of mine and hang it up.

“That's all right, I'll keep it on.”

I show her into the living room. “Would you like some coffee or tea? A drink?”

“I'm fine.”

I consider pouring myself a glass of wine, which I could sorely use, but am reticent to drink alone.

We settle onto opposite chairs, Alice perched at the very edge of hers, glancing around nervously, chewing the inside of her mouth in agitation.

“You were at Deirdre's service,” I remark.

“Yes.” Alice looks down at her lap.

I nod. It is impossible not to wonder about our predecessors in love, to compare ourselves to them, searching for similarities, hoping for flaws, wondering, too, what they can tell us about the person who is now ours.

Tears begin to fill Alice's eyes but she doesn't bother to brush them aside, she just lets them fall. She is a universe away.

“Are you all right? Can I get you anything?”

She shakes her head. “I always knew Jack loved her,” she says, picking up a thought midstream. “I knew it when I married him, even though he said he hadn't talked to her in years. I thought it was the past but as soon as we were married they got back in contact. I tried to ignore it. I told myself it didn't mean anything, that he had picked me. The thing is, he never really chose me at all.”

“He married you.”

“I was a distraction he hoped would work, but that's different from love.”

I'm uncertain what she wants from me, affirmation or refutation. “I'm sure it was more than that,” I tell her.

She looks at me vacantly, wrapped in resignation, there is no fight left in her. “Did you know that Jack saved everything Deirdre ever gave him? He kept a box stashed in the back of a closet with all these pictures of her from college, notes she had left him, movie tickets. All these souvenirs of their affair. He thought I didn't know about it, but I saw him with it sometimes. I used to look at them myself when he wasn't home, trying to figure out what hold she had on him. But I never said anything. Then, in the last few months, everything began to change. Jack changed.”

“What do you mean?”

“He started making trips to New York he never really told me the purpose of. There were middle-of-the-night phone calls. He wasn't always where he said he was. It was getting harder and harder to pretend it wasn't happening even though I kept trying. It's amazing how much you can delude yourself if you want to.”

“I know,” I say quietly. “Jack told me you were having troubles,” I gently posit. “In your marriage, I mean. He thought you were seeing someone else.”

Alice looks at me incredulously. “He told you that? That's ridiculous. He knows that's not true.”

She stands up and goes to the window, staring at the street below for a long while. “When Jack came home that night and told me he wanted to give our marriage a fresh start, I was so happy. You have no idea how relieved I was. I didn't ask him why the sudden renewed interest. I didn't care. It was everything I'd been hoping for.”

She turns to me defiantly. “You know what? I was happy when I heard Deirdre had died. I know she was your friend and I know that's a horrible thing for me to say, but it's true. I thought for the first time I'd have Jack to myself. I thought we'd finally have a chance.”

She sits back down, studying me to see how deep a wound she has inflicted.

I am suddenly so very tired.

“Alice, why did you come here tonight?” I ask.

She looks off into the mid-distance, speaking in a trance. “I heard him come in that night. He thought I was sleeping but I heard his key in the door. I heard him take a shower in the downstairs bathroom. The next morning when I found him sleeping on the couch, I didn't say anything. He was back, that's all I cared about.”

“What are you saying?” I ask, confused.

“When we got back from the Cape the next day, the police called to tell us about Deirdre. While Jack was being questioned in New York they talked to me, too. They asked what time Jack had gotten back Monday and I told them eleven. That's what he had told me. Maybe it was true. I don't know.”

“But you do know,” I say.

She plays with a ragged hangnail, unable to look me in the eyes. “I looked at the clock, it was close to three a.m.”

“Why didn't you say anything?”

“I wasn't in the habit of questioning him. He was with me, that's all I cared about. Then the DNA results came back and they exonerated Jack so it didn't seem to matter.”

“I don't understand why you're telling me all this now.”

“Last night, when Jack thought I was asleep, I saw him crouched in his study, weeping, holding on to that stupid box of mementos. I realized he was never going to let her go. Even after Deirdre died she had this unbreakable power over him. I was never going to win, it was always going to be her. I could lie to myself, I could lie for him but it was never going to make a bit of difference.”

I can see him sitting in the dark, Jack with his pieces and his pictures, thinking he could compartmentalize his feelings for Deirdre, keep them hidden away, contained, manageable. He had done it for so long, almost done it.

“What happened?” I ask dully.

“I decided to wait until he went back to bed and then throw the box away.” Her eyes are half closed. “I realize it was just a symbolic gesture, that it wouldn't really change anything, and I knew Jack would be furious when he realized what I'd done, but I didn't care.
It was bad enough trying to compete with her when she was alive but I had no intention of spending the rest of my life trying to compete with a ghost.”

“Did you get rid of it?”

“No.” Alice stops speaking. She digs her hand into her pocket and pulls something out, holding it in her tightly clenched fist so that I cannot see what it is.

Finally, she opens one finger at a time.

Lying in the palm of her hand is the gold chain with the diamond heart that Jack had given to Deirdre.

“This is hers, isn't it?” Alice asks.

I nod.

“I knew everything in that box. I know that sounds sick, but I couldn't help it. This wasn't in it before Jack went to New York that last time. It wasn't there before she died.”

I hold out my hand and she slides the necklace slowly into it. The light catches the diamonds. I bring it closer. Staining just a quarter inch of the delicate chain I see what I am certain is dried blood.