Practical Jean (6 page)

Natalie was the first to arrive, blooming in a summer dress, her lips freshly fruited, and Milt got to the door first and greeted her. “Well, don't you look extra spiffy,” she said. She caught Jean's eye and waggled a paper bag. “More cupcakes, Jean. I say you can't have too many.”

Milt was still beaming from the compliment. “I'm drinking Mojitos,” he said, brandishing his glass. “Want one?”

Natalie pursed her lips until they rose up red like a welt, and winched them left and right in contemplation. “You know, I think I'll start with a straight-up scotch.”

Dorothy Perks arrived next, in a loose black tank top and bunched shorts, her long dark hair gone netted in the humidity. She came up the walk with a phone to her ear and silvery bangles in the crook of her elbow; from her other hand, her large leather purse hung by the straps like a melee weapon ready to be slung.

“I don't know how long I can stay,” were the first words out of her mouth, as she hugged Jean one-armed in the foyer.

“Is it Roy?”

She dropped her phone into her purse with an exasperated sigh. “No one knows how to handle him. People intimidate so easily. He's a teddy bear if you show him who's in charge.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of Shiraz. “Here. Sorry. It's what we had.”

Roy was not Dorothy's child, although most people overhearing her conversations about him might have assumed that to be so. No, Roy was her husband. In high school, Dorothy had always been attracted to the manliest boys, and so it had been no surprise to Jean that a few years after graduation she had started dating, and eventually married, a cruiserweight boxer by the name of Roy “Big Boy” Lundquist.

“Big Boy” had his run in the 1970s and ended up with a record of eight wins, forty-two losses. His trouble was that cruiserweight was a fairly unpopular division, and he had a hard time finding appropriate matches. If he'd been able to knock off some pounds he could have competed one rung down in the middleweight division and might have won his share. But Roy, who was Swedish by heritage, had too great a love for
surströmming
, a putrid-smelling fermented herring that he bought and consumed by the crate, and so his only option had been to bulk up and compete in the heavyweight division, where stronger, better boxers more or less spread him on toast. Now, in his late fifties, “Big Boy” had a classic case of
dementia pugilistica
. He was punch drunk, permanently impaired, and Dorothy was more his nanny than his wife.

Milt appeared from around the corner. “Hey, Dorothy,” he said, lifting his glass. “Mojito?”

Dorothy looked at Milt and shook her head as if she were startled, distracted, as if this were far too much input to process. “Mojito,” she repeated, squinting. “No, uh . . . what is that, rum? No . . . God . . . Don't you just have some club soda or something?”

Jean looked at Milt as they passed him. “I told you none of my friends like those drinks.”

Milt watched them go. “You wait!”

A few minutes later, as Jean and Milt entertained their two guests in the living room, they heard the rumble of a high-performance engine from the street and Natalie said, “Quick, Jean, where's your red carpet?”

“Natalie,” said Jean, “you be nice.”

In the foyer, Adele Farbridge, still as thin and sharp as a stiletto heel, smiled with her large masculine teeth and cleared strands of ironed hair from her face with the arms of the sunglasses she pushed back on her head. “Jean!” she said, as if her sight had just now been restored, and pressed her cheek-to-cheek. “Oh, it's so good to see you. How are you? Can I say, again, how awful I felt not making it to the funeral?” She spoke in a deep, cello-ish voice, mouthing each phrase as though applying salve to the wounds of the dispossessed. “It was simply impossible because we were making a substantial bid for a Herbert Mense property on Monday. He's heading to divorce court, desperate for money, and so our opportunity was upon us and we needed to have all our ducks in a row.”

“Well, it's so great to see you now!” said Jean, who found herself suddenly swaying to follow the path of Adele's gaze because Adele, holding a black, lizard-skin briefcase in two hands, had begun to look down at the floor around her tiny, silver sandals. “Adele?” said Jean. “Can I—?”

“Jean, is there somewhere I can tuck this for safekeeping?” Adele held the case out before her. “I didn't want to leave it in the car.”

“Good thinking,” called Natalie from the living room. “We've got so much street crime in Kotemee.”

Adele swiveled her head in the direction of the voice. “Is that Natalie Skilbeck?” she said. “How wonderful.”

Jean and Adele had met during their first year of art college, back in 1975. For nearly a year they'd roomed together, and Jean had been rather enthralled with Adele's offhand way with men and wine and money. Adele came from an established family, had gone to a private girls' school, and told Jean at the time she had no intention of becoming an artist. She'd chosen photography as her major only because her financier father had given her a Leica for her seventeenth birthday, and she told Jean she wanted to “live the artist life” for a while. “To scratch around,” she purred. “To think and fuck and drink and get a bit dirty from it all.” After that first year she quit, made her teary goodbyes, and went on to economics at Cornell, but Jean had felt a need to keep the friendship going ever since.

In the foyer, Milt jostled his glass and rattled some music from his ice cubes. “Mojito, Adele?”

“No thank you, Milt,” she said, reaching out to touch his cheek. “But a Fumé Blanc, or whatever you have that's dry, dry, dry would be lovely.”

Louise Draper was typically late to arrive. Jean saw her through the sheer drapes of the front window, coming up the walk with a bouquet of something in her hand. She was dressed in the same white blouse and tan skirt Jean had seen her wearing two days before. According to Milt she often wore the same outfit in class two or even three times a week, and it was only because she was such a good teacher that her students weren't merciless. It always gave Jean an uneasy feeling on Louise's behalf, to think that she was working with a strike against her because she was a tiny bit odd. People had no tolerance for difference, even in one's own family. Maybe especially there.

As Jean watched through the window, preparing to open the front door, Louise stopped suddenly on the walk and turned as if to go back to her car. But then she lifted her right arm and seemed startled by the purse dangling from her shoulder, and resumed her advance to the door.

“Oh, jeez, I'm late, aren't I?” she said, giggling as she entered. “D'you know what? I thought it was last night and I'd missed it. Really, seriously, I'm such a loser sometimes.” Looking off into the living room she slipped out of her pumps as if she were stepping off a log and then studied with apparent confusion the bouquet in her hand. “Right. So I saw this bouquet at that little shop on the corner of Cumner. You know those two old gay men?”

“Aren't they lovely?” said Jean. “So personable.”

“I know, I know, they're great, they're so great. And I saw this bouquet, and you can ignore all the flowers”—Louise made spattery gestures with her free hand at the many colored blooms—“because they're just, well I know you're not into those. But I just thought, you know, the leaves were nice.” She giggled again.

Taking the bouquet, Jean knew there was nothing interesting about the leaves. They were just more of the typical florist greenery—a few cuttings of leatherleaf fern and cocculus—and she'd long ago exhausted any artistic potential there. No, it was Louise thinking of leaves at all that touched her. “That's so sweet,” she said.

“Hey, Louise,” said Milt from the limits of the foyer. “Can I interest you in a Mojito?”

“Oh, sure, that'd be great.”

“Really?” said Jean. It was easy to believe that Louise might not be clear on the nature of Mojitos. “It's sort of a resorty cocktail with sugar.”

“Yeah, yeah. Well, actually,” she paused to wave at Natalie in the living room, “uh, Milt and I were both in the liquor store when they were giving out samples of this mix they had and it was pretty good.”

Jean turned toward her husband. “Is that right, Milt?” she said. “Is that what gave you the idea for Mojitos?”

Milt went somewhat still and nodded to Jean with a certain care. “Yes.”

Jean glanced back at Louise, who was staring at the flowers in Jean's hands. “Well, good!” she said to Milt with a light laugh. “At least you won't be drinking that whole pitcher yourself.”

For an hour or so, they just chatted, Jean and her friends, and Milt, of course, staying rather quiet now with his tall, tinkling glass. Seeing all of them seated in her living room, comfortable and well served with drinks and snacks, Jean let herself enjoy, for a while and to the degree that she was able, the fun of having everyone together. Dorothy quickly dropped the pretense of soda and moved to wine, which allowed her to talk about men she found attractive, and that was always fun. Louise did a masterful job of mining the woeful ignorance of her students for everyone's entertainment. Natalie was her usual feisty self. On books: “You know what burns my ass? Novels that try to teach me something. I want a story, not a goddamn textbook.” On Hollywood: “Political movie stars make me puke. Hey, Bozo, your opinion on gun control is an assault on my pleasure.” On Adele: “Farbridge, where are those butter tarts you promised, warming on your manifold?” And Adele had to stop talking about foreign exchange risk and who got drunk at Davos and give her apologies. Apparently there'd been a line at the tart shop that would have delayed her arrival for thirty minutes. “That's how marvelous their tarts are,” she insisted. So about the tarts, at least, everyone understood.

But it wasn't quite the usual gathering for Jean. She felt an urgency in the midst of her friends that had to do with more than making sure their glasses were filled, an urgency that seemed both familiar and new. Since the funeral she'd worked hard to keep thoughts about her mother and what her mother had endured at bay. But now, surrounded by the women she was closest to, those thoughts hovered behind everything she said and heard, coloring it all, darkening it like a bruise. She looked around the room at these women and saw how life had marked them. Their worries and misfortunes sat with them like shadows. To her left was Natalie and Natalie's hypertension and sadly crumbled marriage. At the end of the couch sat Dorothy and the awful burden of her uncrumbled one. Beside her was Louise and . . . well, Louise was perfectly healthy and had no burdens as far as Jean knew. But she was slightly odd, and that was its own kind of trouble. And over in the mahogany armchair sat Adele and Adele's mastectomy, which she had suffered five years before after finding a lump during her getaway to Antigua. And beyond those trials, all the things that Jean as a friend had been helpless to prevent, she knew there were more to come. Vicious, ruthless time was grinding away like a jackhammer, pulverizing bit by bit the foundations of their contentment. It was coming down, inevitably. In her urgency, Jean could see what her friends could not: the room was crowded with warning.

She tried to keep up a cheery front, smiling and laughing and doing her best to participate, but it seemed that no one was fooled. Milt was the first to act, joining Jean in the kitchen when she went to get more cheese and asking if everything was all right. She assumed he was asking because she'd found out about the Mojito tasting with Louise and he was feeling guilty, so she told him it didn't matter. She hoped never to get upset over something so insignificant, now or ever again.

But after that, one by one, each of the women made an attempt to connect with her. Was she all right? Was anything bothering her? They did it subtly, with eye contact or a light touch on her arm, or more forcefully by other means. Natalie asked Jean at one point to show her where the bathroom was, although she knew perfectly well, and when they were alone she cornered her in the hallway.

“Jean, I want you to talk to me,” she said, staring into her eyes. “You're upset. I can tell. I felt it earlier in the shop. It's no good sitting on feelings, you know. That's how things just explode.”

Jean did what she usually did, which was to make a joke about it. The only problem, she laughed, was having to manage all the personalities in the room. Everyone was “so much work.” Getting drinks, getting snacks, attending to every little remark. “It reminds me of waiting on my mother.” And of course she wasn't serious at all—she was glad everyone was there—and Natalie didn't take it that way. But something about confessing to a friend, even in that small way, about the ordeal of the last three months put a small chink in Jean's wall of defense. It was the smallest of fissures, the merest hairline crack, and the emotion that leaked through it was barely a dribble compared to the vast lake still pressing against the dam. But it was enough to start her crying.

She felt like such a child, blubbering in front of a friend. Natalie led her to the bathroom so as not to disturb the others, Jean apologizing the whole time. “I'm so sorry. This is so silly of me.” There seemed to be torrents inside of her trying to come out. But in the midst of her tears Jean glanced up and, seeing the worry in her friend's face, she just put a clamp on things, just shut it down and composed herself. “That's enough of that,” she said, blinking. She washed her face; the cool water against her cheeks felt calming, just like Natalie's comforting words. And when she'd patted herself dry with a soft towel, and the two of them had come back into the living room, everyone appeared to believe that Jean had had a good cry. Jean knew better, of course; it hadn't been good at all. Nothing had been assuaged or released. But still, the belief seemed to make it easier for everyone to talk a little more openly than before.