That Part Was True (2 page)

Dexter Cameron raised his shoulders in a loose, elegant gesture. A practiced gesture, he was an actor. “Nah, thanks…living broke is like carrying something heavy—you get used to the required stance.”

“Okay, well, you know it's there.”

“I know it's there,” Dex said.

Jack drank to him. And then to redress the sense of off-balance that had been introduced, he asked, “How's Brooke?”

“Seventeen, even better looking than her mother, assessing colleges the way a person assesses colleges when they've got a choice.”

“Seventeen?”

“Seventeen.”

Brooke, the dynamic progeny of one of Dex's insubstantial romances, had been a toddler when he and Jack had first met. Her mother had moved to New Mexico soon after the child's second birthday, but Dex had kept in touch with them, and visited regularly.

“You still call her every Tuesday?”

“Every Tuesday.”

“You're a good man.”

It was Dex's turn to raise his glass. He did, and the conversation could have ended. They were two men who'd been friends for a long time and who, early in that time, had found an unquestioning, and only ever mildly competitive, ease in each other's company. They could have sat, as they had sat many times before, looking at nothing in particular, talking about nothing in particular. The tide was in and the even sound of the waves on the shore beneath the house beat through to them. But Dex said, “
You
, that's what's on my mind.”

Jack, caught by the backtrack and detecting a level of inquiry in it that he did not want to address, stood without replying and went into the kitchen, where he poured out his beer and took a fresh one from the refrigerator. Coming back into the room, where Dex had propped his bare feet on a low table near the open French doors, he held the bottle up and said, “For your edification—C-Z-E-C-H. Look it up sometime.”

But Dex's eyes indicated that he wasn't going to be so easily diverted.

“I. Is. Fine,” Jack said, forcefully chipper, but his voice and motion of his sitting, opposite Dex in a high-backed Swedish chair, were enfeebled by underlying insincerity.

“What's the deal with Marnie?”

There was just enough breeze to swell the white muslin of the curtains. Jack, watching them, said, “I don't know and I don't care.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, Dex, I don't.” He rested his beer on the table that housed Dex's feet and got up again, returning a moment later with a wooden bowl full of nuts. He put it down, next to the beer, dislodging the feet, with full-stop emphasis.

“So is she living with this other chick, or what?” Dex said.

“She's living with this other chick. Her name is Carla. She's a librarian from Wisconsin. Now let's drop the subject.”

Dex leaned forward and scooped a handful of the nuts with a tight eye on Jack. He'd never, in fifteen years, seen him look the way he looked now: low. Dex was the one who got low, got drunk, got crazy. He shot a few of the nuts into his mouth. “Whooa, these are good,” he said. “What'd you do to 'em?” He opened his hand, gazed admiringly, then ate the rest.

“I rolled them in melted butter and honey and salt…like you care. Just eat them.”

Dex smiled and stared out at the horizon and Jack stared out at it, too.

Then Dex asked, “You writing?” Although he knew better.

“Let's drop the subject,” Jack said for the second time.

Later, Jack heated oil and butter in a cast iron skillet and waited till it began to smoke. Then he dropped two steaks onto the pan and flipped them. He had floured the steaks lightly and the flour muddied. He took the meat from the pan, and the pan from the heat, and he pushed the kitchen window open wider before adding a generous, steady pour of red wine to it from the large glass on the counter. Then he put the pan back on the heat, lowered it, and while he waited for the liquid to reduce, lifted the glass again and drained it. Then he stood gazing for a moment at the familiar view of emerald lawn and low hydrangea bushes and ocean, but he didn't see it. He saw his fiftieth birthday coming straight at him like a freight train.

Eve had found the card three years previously on a grim, three-day trip to Cornwall with her mother. They had stayed at an agreeable hotel where the food was outstanding, but Virginia had found nothing to her taste. And with the exception of the half hour she'd spent flirting each evening with the embarrassed young waiter who brought them their six o'clock cocktails, she had been miserable company. Eve, wandering along the picturesque bay front one afternoon while Virginia napped, had bought the card and a small box of fancily packaged fudge. Not because she had any particular purpose for them, but because she had felt self-conscious alone in the shop. She had given the fudge to Gwen and tucked the card into her desk, ready for some occasion that had never arisen.

Now she was struck by the similarity between the picture on her card and the picture on the postcard that Jack Cooper had sent her, a picture with which she was by now extremely familiar. She turned both the cards over and compared the names of the artists, but there was apparently no connection. Then she opened her card to its pristine interior and wrote:

She slid the card into its envelope and addressed it and put it in her desk. She'd ask Gwen to pick up some stamps tomorrow.

Upstairs she could hear voices. Izzy and her boyfriend, Ollie, had driven down late the previous evening. Eve had gone to bed, leaving them plates of cold chicken and salad in case they wanted any supper, but she had heard them arrive; the thud of the car doors and Izzy's instructions—issued with a bluffness that gave no concession to the hour—to Ollie about their luggage.

Now Izzy was luxuriating in her favorite claw-foot tub in the big bathroom off the hall and talking. Izzy's was a voice that had an authority in it, Eve thought, even when she was lying naked in a bath full of almond oil. Almost twenty-eight now, she was an art appraiser at a big auction house. She'd had the kind of career path people describe as “meteoric.” Eve supposed it had stood her in good stead, that voice. “Everything about her is compelling,” she said to herself as she got up and walked back down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the back door to the garden. She wanted to pick some mint for the lamb that she was going to roast later for lunch.

“But what does she do all day?” Izzy lifted one foot out of the bath and onto a fat white bathmat. Then she shook the second foot behind her like a sleek animal clearing a fence and reached for a towel.

“She volunteers at that shop, doesn't she?”

“Once in a blue moon. I don't think the Red Cross are exactly dependent on her.”

“Friends? Bridge or whatever?”

“Not anymore. She used to do a few things like that, but I don't think she really does now. And she only really putters in the garden these days.”

“She's not very old,” Ollie suggested, tilting his chin to shave underneath it. “And she's good-looking. Maybe she's got a man.”

If Izzy had responded to this, rather than simply reacting as was her tendency, she might have seen, in the patch that Ollie had cleared with his palm in the steam-fogged mirror, that he was smiling when he looked down to rinse his razor. But she didn't.

“Don't be grotesque, Ollie,” she scolded, tucking the towel across her chest and flipping her head forward to wrap her hair in a second one. “Honestly, the idea.”

Eve salted and chopped the mint and left it to steep in sugar and water. Then she moved a jug of daisies into the center of the kitchen table and laid cork mats for a casual breakfast. Through the window, at the very edge of the garden, where the woodland backed toward the house, she could see a white foxglove. Eve loved white foxgloves; the genteel loll of them, the defiant brilliance among their more common purple cousins. She stood looking at this one and a small, silent bond blossomed between them for a moment until Izzy and Ollie joined her, dressed as they always were on their visits in studied country garb of expensive jeans and oversized sweaters.

Eve saw immediately the reason for the impromptu trip. Izzy was wearing an engagement ring. Catching her mother's eye, she flashed her hand up.

“Ta-daah,” she said flamboyantly, although the gesture and the twitching, dangling fingers it burgeoned were suffused with self-consciousness. But then, powerfully candid suddenly, she dropped her arm and burst out, “I wish Gin-gin were here. The wedding won't be right without her.”

The protest drowned Eve's “Congratulations,” and she didn't know how to respond to it, so she sent Ollie to fetch some champagne and busied herself for a moment squeezing orange juice.

Izzy, recovering quickly, sitting, and finding that firm ground again between ersatz and heartfelt, went on, “And you needn't ask. I'm not.”

Eve washed the orange juice from her hands and set the husks aside for candying. In fact, it had not crossed her mind that Izzy might be pregnant. Izzy had known the circumstances of Eve's own marriage because Virginia had told her—at too delicate an age, Eve had always thought. But she had felt at least that the knowledge might discourage Izzy from marrying for only that reason. Not, she realized now, that Izzy would. Times were different and Izzy was different. Different from Eve.

“I won't be waddling down the aisle like a hippo,” Izzy announced, straying back into false notes, but nevertheless confirming Eve's thoughts.

Eve did not respond. The issue done with, she initiated the toast, Ollie had opened the champagne, and “Congratulations,” she said again. “Here's to many happy years.” She lifted her glass to the two young faces. Too young probably, she thought, and yet older than I was.

“He'll be wandering before the end of the honeymoon,” Virginia had said. Eve had heard the click of her gold compact case through the cubicle door in the ornate powder room of the restaurant where Simon Petworth, her husband-to-be, debonair beyond his years, had treated a group of friends and family to dinner to celebrate their engagement.

“Oh, I don't know,” Dodo, Virginia's only close friend, replied, “She's very pretty. And you can never tell with those quiet types.”

Eve, holding her breath for fear of discovery, which would have made the ghastly overhearing even ghastlier, could imagine them, intent on their own reflections, fiddling with their hair and applying lipstick.

“Believe me, I can tell,” Virginia's voice went on. “He can't keep it in his pants and she's as exciting as boiled cabbage.”

Eve, nineteen years old and nine weeks into her first trimester, had thought that she might faint then, but she hadn't. What she had done was to resign herself, over the sound of her mother's laughter, to the swift loss of her husband's affections. Like a bird, whose heart gives out before the cat has killed it.

Jack, loosened by
moonlight and boozing and a long evening's philosophical talk with Dex, said, “She had a Ford.”

The subject of Marnie's departure had come up again, and this time he hadn't resisted it. “I thought it was too domestic looking. Your wife's lover's car oughtta be something foreign. Something with flair, don't ya think?”

“A Porsche,” Dex suggested.

“Exactly. This was a station wagon. It had a bumper sticker on it that said, ‘I Heart Books.'”

They both thought about this for a moment.

“That's when I knew I really didn't care enough,” Jack said, “when I realized that the element of the situation that I found most offensive was the ‘I Heart Books' bumper sticker.”

The next day they were wordlessly engaged in the purposeful imbibing of medicinal bloody Marys, bacon, and pancakes on the back deck in the late morning sunshine when a light, female voice floated to them from the side of the house.

“Hello?”

Jack, despite not recognizing the voice, tensed. He'd been parking his car in the garage, instead of leaving it in the driveway with the keys in the ignition as he usually did, for the past two weeks in order to avoid Lisa. So far, he'd managed it. She'd left a message on his telephone, though, and then, two nights before, had come to the kitchen door and, finding it locked, moved around to the front of the house, where she'd bent to peer beneath a slatted blind.

Jack, alerted by the rustle of foliage, had instinctively dropped and rolled behind a three-seater sofa. Lying on his back, rock still, sharply aware of his physical being, the pinch of suppressed breath, and the charged prick of carpet fibers, he realized that this was no way for a grown man to live.

“Adrienne!” Dex said, alert suddenly. “I forgot.”

“The love life lull endeth?”

“Not mine, pal. Yours.”

“Hello?” the voice came again, louder now, clear but not insistent. Wind chimes at sea.

She was a tall, sand-colored blonde, wearing loose, white linen pants and a very pale blue shirt that might have been a man's except that it fit her too perfectly. When she took off her sunglasses and smiled at him on being introduced, he noted that her eyes and the shirt were an exact match. She looked like something perfect from nature—driftwood. Very different from Lisa. This was not a comparison that Jack was making from imagination—Lisa had followed Adrienne into the house and out onto the deck.

“I'm Lisa,” she said, introducing herself brightly, although she looked nervous, like someone who, having stepped confidently onto a bridge, has found it less sturdy than assumed. She had been watching Jack's house, unwillingly compulsive, for signs of life, signs of Jack, for days—although the thought of actually seeing him made her stomach jump. Since her curtailed moment in his arms, a long-held, enjoyable crush had mutated into excruciating hope. She had called out to the blond woman, whom she'd seen skirting his side wall, on impulse, and now here she was. And there was he: inflated, illuminated, and too handsome.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hey,” he replied in a voice that gave her nothing.

“Adrienne,” the blond woman said.

And then Jack introduced Lisa to Dex, and asked everybody what they were drinking.

“I have a friend who's a model,” Lisa said.

Rick, Jack's Filipino housekeeper, was clearing the pancake debris, and as he leaned past her, Lisa jiggled her chair slightly, automatically closer to Jack's. It was a moment in which nothing was obvious, but a great deal was perceptible. Dex looked from Jack to Lisa and back again, but it was Rick's eye that Jack avoided. Rick could assume a blank expression that spoke volumes, and Jack didn't want to hear it.

Lisa's comment hung in the air for a moment before Adrienne, understanding suddenly, said, “Oh, no, I'm not a model. I'm a photographer.” Dex had said that they'd met on a shoot.

“She took the stills for that short film I did in March,” he added now.

“The one you went up to Canada for?” Jack asked.

“Yep. She's spectacularly good.”

Jack and Lisa both looked at Adrienne then, but she barely responded.

“Every shot had a sort of…quality to it,” Dex went on. “Beautiful. Never obvious.”

Jack found himself watching Adrienne for some sign of a connection between her and Dex that went beyond professional admiration. He saw none. Nor did he see Lisa, gingerly chewing a celery stick, intently watching him.

“I tried to capture the sense of the piece,” Adrienne responded mildly. “And the actors—I was very impressed by that particular cast—the intensity you brought to the work. It was incredible.”

They wandered off then into film talk, and Jack was struck as he had been before by the change in Dex. He took his acting seriously. He was different when he spoke about it—focused.

Lisa, taking advantage of the conversational pairing, leaned in and twisted to Jack. The view of her that this angle afforded him—wide eyes and cleavage—was part infantile and part maternal. Jack found it an uneasy combination.

“How are you?” she asked.

Jack felt, in the intensity of her gaze, as if he might be suffering from something grave, possibly terminal. “Let's all walk down to Mama's and eat crab,” he said in response, too loudly. He had to stand up and clap his hands like a fool to fit the weight of his pitch.

Later, in the men's room at Mama's, Dex said, “Since when are you hitting on this Lisa broad?”

“I'm not hitting on this Lisa broad,” Jack replied, soaping his hands.

Dex raised an eyebrow.

“It's a misunderstanding,” Jack said. He pulled a paper towel from the dispenser, dried his hands, and tossed the towel into the plastic trash bin.

“I've had misunderstandings like that,” Dex said. “Reeeeeel messy.”

They began walking back into the restaurant, but Jack came to a sudden stop next to a potted palm. He could see the women sitting outdoors on the terrace under the shade of the striped awning. “I'm never going to be able to shake her,” he said somberly.

Dex stopped, too. He looked in the same direction as Jack. Lisa was talking animatedly while Adrienne toyed with a breadstick that she wasn't eating.

“Pooped pretty close to your own backyard there, didn't ya, fella?”

Jack sighed. “I'm going to have to sell my house.”

“Nah.” Dex laughed. “If you keep ignoring them, they get it. You have to check your car for incendiary devices for a while, but they get it.”

Jack ran his palm over his face.

“Now, if you'd waited,” Dex said, “instead of jumping the first thing that smelled good, you randy old goat, you'd have seen that I could produce the perfect woman to get you over your ‘Do I turn women gay?' crisis. Adrienne is that woman. Do you not agree?”

“I'm not sure what I'm agreeing with,” Jack said. “There's too much bullshit floating around.”

“Adrienne,” Dex said, turning to him, index finger outstretched, “is classy people. Don't foul it up.”

Jack was momentarily mesmerized, thrown by this shift in their roles. It was Jack's job to tell Dex not to foul things up. That was how it had always been. And yet here he was, the erstwhile steady guy of the pair, ducking behind couches and nursing hangovers while Dex was apparently straightening out. And he was right, Adrienne was classy people.

“I went to the Kingston School of Design,” she said a few minutes later, when he asked about her training over coffee, which she had refused in favor of more water.

“Good school,” Jack said.

“Good student, too, I bet,” Dex added.

Lisa, offering Adrienne the plate of macaroons that had been served with their coffee, said, “Would you like one of these?” She gave the plate an inane little shake, and immediately wished she hadn't. Unnerved by Adrienne's silvery cool, hideously unsure of where she stood with Jack, and dreading knowing, she had become increasingly flighty over lunch. She was aware of it. She couldn't stop.

“No, thank you,” Adrienne said, returning Lisa's smile with one that was gracious, if somewhat lightless. She hadn't eaten any crab either.

Eating his, Jack had wondered, as he always did, at Mama's cooking. She'd been serving up crab for twenty years with no apparent diminishment of enthusiasm. You could still taste the heart. She and Hatty, who ran the little coffee shop on South Street, were among the few people left in Grove Shore, Jack thought, who understood that key ingredient in food. Too many of them were just serving up immaculate plates of pretty precision. But Mama's touch had been wasted on Adrienne.

“I'm a vegetarian,” she had explained when they ordered. Adding, unnecessarily, “I don't eat animals.”

“
I
had an eating disorder for a while,” Lisa announced in response. “But I found this great therapist. Cured me like
that
.” It was a joke, but the delivery, ill-timed and lacking backbone, crippled it. She clicked her fingers, and in the silence that the remark had engendered, the sound carried.

Dex, saving her, laughed. And Lisa, bestowing on him in return a weak, grateful smile, lifted her glass and took another earnest step toward complete intoxication.

At some point after the discussion about the Kingston School and Dex's second too-long Hollywood anecdote, at which Lisa grinned uncomfortably, while Adrienne toyed impassively with her water tumbler, Jack felt his mood dulling. He had done very little work since Marnie had left and he had drunk too much—never a good combination for him. But it was several hours afterward that the nadir came.

When the coffee was finished, they walked back along the beach to the house, Adrienne carrying her tan leather sandals by their straps, dangling them from her long fingers.

Lisa—her tendency to chatter extinguished finally by alcohol, Jack's casually pally manner toward her, and the taunting inner voices that plagued her thirty-eight-year-old, single status—grew mute and fell behind. And Jack, noticing, conscious of a growing thud in his left temple and a groggy sensation of afternoon hangover regret and hopelessness, was struck by the sadness in the downward line of her small jaw. He reached to pull her back into the group and let his arm lie across her shoulders, affectionately, lazily, for long enough to reignite her.

By the time they reached the wooden steps that rose from the sand to the back of Jack's garden, his desire to climb them alone was close to overwhelming, but Lisa, spurred by refreshed optimism, tripped swiftly up ahead of him, her pert little rear—an apricot in stretch Capri pants—almost at his nose as she ascended the steep first part of the flight. And then Dex stood back to let Adrienne pass, too. Jack resigned himself to the rest of the evening. He had lost all interest in it.

Adrienne, at the house, made leaving noises, but Dex, discouraging, pulled a chair back for her on the deck, where they'd been when she arrived. It was after five by then, and Jack, seeking comfort and solitude, retreated to the one place he knew he could always find it, the kitchen.

“You need something, chief?” Rick asked.

“No, Rick. It's fine. Why don't you take off for the day?”

Rick looked at his boss, suspicious. But he looked at Jack that way a lot, so Jack ignored it.

“Take the rest of that ham, if you think Christa could use it.”

They both knew that Christa could use it. Rick's wife was feeding her own family and about half a dozen others as far as Jack could tell—cousins, friends, a constant influx of relatives looking for work in America.

“Okay, chief,” Rick said. He removed the white jacket he always wore at Jack's house and hung it on a hanger on a hook inside the door of a large walk-in cupboard. Then he took the ham out of the refrigerator and wrapped it.

“Don't forget the girls are coming to clean tomorrow morning,” he said.

“No,” Jack said. It was the sort of thing he always forgot immediately.

Jack wanted to sober up. And he figured Dex and Lisa could do with it, too. He could hear them laughing outside and he knew Dex had opened another bottle of wine. Adrienne was the only one still in full possession of her faculties. She was not a person, Jack thought, whom it was easy to imagine in any other state.

He took two long loaves from a basket, and lay them on a chopping board and turned the oven on. He had some provolone; he'd make crostini now to sop up the booze, and then later ratatouille. Adrienne could eat that, if she stayed.

“My father buys all your books,” she said then from the doorway, where she'd appeared silently, like a shadow.

Jack had begun slicing the bread. Inwardly he sighed. Outwardly he smiled.

“He loves them,” Adrienne went on.

“Thank him for me,” Jack replied, waiting for the request of a signed copy.

“Will you keep writing the same sorts of things?”

It was an innocent enough question—the wrong question, but the sort of thing that people did ask all the time. Jack had fielded worse, and from less genial people than Adrienne. But it wasn't a good day. It hadn't been a good few weeks.

“No,” he said deliberately. “I'm gonna write some fancy, literary stuff that all those critics in New York who hate me are gonna need their thesauruses to review.” His expression hadn't altered, but there was no mistaking the vehemence of his tone.

Adrienne straightened herself from the doorjamb. “I meant—” she began slowly, choosing her words.

Jack put his knife down and interrupted her. “I know what you meant. You meant: Now that I've made my millions, why don't I write something worth a shit?”

“No—” she said, still thinking.