The Divorce Party (15 page)

“It’s possible, and probably good news for you if it’s true.”

“Why?”

“Because that will make it easier one day when you feel bad about all of this, when you are a little more sure of yourself, when you would never dream of getting involved in someone’s marriage. It will make you feel better about what you’ve done. Or that’s giving you too much credit. What you’ve helped do.”

“Whatever issues you have, you should take them up with Thomas. He’s the one you should be talking to.”

“Believe me, I will. But you still need to stay for a minute and hear me out. I still need that from you. Can you do that for me?”

Eve doesn’t answer her, but she does move away from the door, goes and sits at the table and so Gwyn goes back to the counter, and starts to unwrap the tray of mushroom caps. There must be tons of other trays in the van to get to, but they will get there.

Once Eve is handled. “Thank you, Eve,” Gwyn says.

“You’re welcome.”

Gwyn finishes taking the layer of film off the container. “My goodness, these smell great!” She leans in closer. “Did you use dill? That’s such an interesting choice.”

“Yes, a marinade of dill and pineapple.”

“Pineapple too?” She shakes her head. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“It’s my mother’s recipe.”

“Sara Stone. Old Coast Road. Big Sur, California.”

Eve gives her a look, but Gwyn just ignores it and looks back at her—into her eyes, which are bright blue, and sad. This close up, there is no denying it.

“Eve, this is not about blame, okay? Or at least this is not about blaming you. It is my husband who has betrayed me. He is the one who decided to break up our marriage. I’m clear on that. You didn’t promise to stand by me thirty-five years ago. And you aren’t the one who should be held responsible for what he has caused here. Or . . . not mostly.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“There are many reasons that I need you to cover this party tonight. Believe it or not, it’s not only for my benefit.”

“So it’s for my benefit?”

“Partially.”

“How do you figure that?”

“You don’t strike me as a saver. And when my husband leaves you, which he will, you are going to be distraught. You are going to want to get far away from here, and him, and anything that has to do with this time in your life. Maybe you’ll want to go back to Big Sur. Who knows? The money you are making tonight will make it possible for you to leave.”

Eve shakes her head. “This is too weird.”

“Many things are, yes.”

Eve folds her arms across her chest—thinking about it, really thinking about it. “In all fairness, I have to say that I think Thomas is going to choose to continue honoring our love.”

“Of course you think that. Why wouldn’t you? My husband thinks that. He is so certain about it, in fact, that he is willing to lie to his entire family in order to guarantee it.”

Eve doesn’t look confused by this, which suggests to Gwyn that he has told her what he is doing: blaming it on something that isn’t blameworthy. A conversion, a spiritual change. And later, once the wounds have healed, once enough time has passed, and it is more allowed, he will have Eve meet his children, even Gwyn herself. When Eve can be aboveboard, not someone worthy of scorn.
This is my new girlfriend,
he will say.
This is Eve Stone.

“But here’s the flip side,” Gwyn says. “When you love someone, when you have spent several decades loving him, you begin to see his insides even before he can see them. You know what he is going to do before he does.”

“And what is he going to do? Stay with you?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“What are you saying?”

Gwyn pulls the check out of her pocket, a check for twenty thousand dollars—six thousand more than they’d agreed on for tonight, just in case the extra money is helpful, just in case it came to this.

She walks up to the table, holds the check between them. “I’m saying that I think that you should take this,” she says.

Eve is quiet, shaking her head. She doesn’t want to take it. Gwyn understands that. To take it means to accept that things may end badly. It means to accept something that you can’t consider when you are in the throes of loving someone. That he may leave, just like he left someone else. That you may not prove to be different. That you may prove to be worthy of leaving too.

“But why?” Eve says.

“Why what?”

“Why is this what you want?”

Gwyn decides to be honest for the first time that day, decides there is no harm now. She sits down across from her.

“It’s not what I want, Eve,” Gwyn says. “None of this. It’s just what I’m doing now.”

“Because you wanted to meet me? Well, you’ve met me.”

“No, it’s not for that. It’s for something else.”

They look at each other, and Gwyn remembers sitting here with the Buckleys so many times: when Nate was a little boy, when Georgia was just born. The time she and Thomas were sitting in these exact spots one night when Marsha made them this terrible cheese fondue, laughing together about how awful it was.

How does it happen? How does someone who was there with you, in all of those moments, let himself get so far away that he ends up putting you here in a moment like this one?

She holds out the check again. “If he loves you the way you think he does, if you’re right, nothing that does or doesn’t happen at this party is going to put that at risk,” she says.

Eve stares at the check. And then she straightens out her dress, her jeans. And Gwyn can see her trying to decide how badly this is going to go, trying to wager that against the large sum of money.

“You don’t even have to come into the party, except to bring in the cake. And that’s only because I made it. The rest of the time, the servers will take care of everything. You probably won’t even see him all night.”

She is silent. “I need to understand why,” she says.

Because,
Gwyn wants to say,
maybe I’ll be able to organize it so he sees you at just the moment that I need him to.

“I know you don’t owe me anything, but you also don’t
not
owe me anything. This was my family. This was my entire life. And it’s not your fault. But then again, that is just semantics. Because if you didn’t exist, I wouldn’t be standing here. If you didn’t want to be with him, all of this would be beside the point.”

“He might have done this for someone else.”

“But he didn’t, did he? He did it for you. We are here now because he chose to do this. For you.”

Eve looks at her, and for a second Gwyn doesn’t know what she is going to do. That’s the way it is, isn’t it? And then she does it.

She takes the check out of Gwyn’s hand. “Where would you like the trays?” she asks.

“The trays?”

“Where would you like me to start setting up?”

“Over there is fine,” Gwyn says, pointing at the counter. “Over there would be great.”

Maggie

They have driven all the way down to Amagansett—back past River Ranch Road and through Montauk town center, through the dunes off the highway, gated entrances leading to small, one-wine vineyards: WALKING TOURS AVAILABLE, Georgia going seventy, eighty miles per hour until they approach a restaurant and she hits the brakes, makes a sharp right into the circular driveway. It is a lovely restaurant in a white clapboard house—a rectangular white and black sign the only thing to distinguish it from the other houses around it, to let people know that it is a restaurant as opposed to a residence:

Maggie is quiet, looking back and forth between the sign and the restaurant. She is afraid to ask the first question that she knows the answer to.

Before she hears the answer out loud, she can still pretend there is another explanation: that Georgia is hungry and wants to get something to eat, or that she just wants to use the bathroom, and this is the first public place to stop. It is a nice bathroom—Maggie can guess, even from just peeking through the front door into the mahogany bar, candlelit, a fire already going.

“Tell me you have to pee,” Maggie says.

“I do.”

“Oh, thank God. For a second, I thought you were going to say this is Ryan’s restaurant.”

“This is Ryan’s restaurant.”

Maggie’s chest drops. It is her fear—it is the possibility that she feared most confirmed. “Ryan’s a chef?”

Georgia nods. “Ryan’s a chef.”

Why does this feel like the worst news there could be, the most threatening? Maggie isn’t sure yet, but she knows it will come to her and that will be worse. Maggie’s eyes focus back on the sign. The date of 1993, shining out at her. Nate told her that he lived here for a few years after high school. She had asked him why, and he had said something about not being ready to leave yet. Not being ready to leave yet: since when is that shorthand for
because insteadof going directly to college I got married and opened a restaurant with my first wife, the one who came before you?

“And Nate opened this place with her? This is his place too?”

Georgia runs her fingers along the steering wheel, the dashboard clock.

“Georgia?”

“You know, you’re pretty good at figuring this all out. Maybe there is no need to go inside and talk to her.”

“There’s a need,” she says, wondering how old Ryan had been when this place opened. If she was opening a restaurant already, she had to be older than Nate, probably significantly older. It reminds her of a conversation she had with Nate early on, an innocent conversation, when she asked him how he decided to be a chef, and a look came over his face. An awful look that he immediately tried to hide with a story that didn’t ring true— something about watching his mother cook for the family when he was little—and a feeling Maggie tried to push down that he wasn’t being honest. That
she
was being crazy, oversensitive. Because what reason would he possibly have had for not telling the truth about that? Here was her answer.

“I am going to have to call Nate when you go inside,” Georgia says. “Just to tell him we’re here. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to fix this, and maybe he will.”

Maggie thinks about that—about all the ways she lets Nate fix everything, about all the ways she has believed that he can. “Be my guest,” she says. “The last thing we need is another secret.”

She looks down and realizes that her hand is on the door handle. She realizes that she is frozen there. She doesn’t open the door because when she does, she will start to have the answers to all of her questions, and maybe the only one that matters: did he not tell Maggie because it mattered so little to him or so much?

“It’s not his anymore. I don’t think she officially bought him out, but he has no association with the place. It’s not like he’s sneaking back here to cook with her or whatever.”

“Now there’s a relief,” Maggie says.

Maggie gets out of the car and gives Georgia a smile. Then she walks up to the restaurant’s front door, steps inside, before she can think about it.

It is closed still—most of the house lights off. Plants are everywhere and a smell that Maggie can’t exactly make out, woodsy, like dried cherries, or pine trees, or a weird combination of the two.

Maggie takes the whole place in, and feels relief that it doesn’t look like their restaurant in Red Hook. Nate hasn’t tried to re-create exactly what he has left behind. That has to be a good thing, she thinks. Only then she can’t help but notice that The House looks—a little disturbingly—like the exact opposite of the restaurant in Red Hook. It is full of things Nate was adamant that he didn’t want for their restaurant: the brick wall and the fireplace, a granite bar, the dark walls.
Is that just as bad?

“Can I help you?

She looks up to see a woman behind the bar, wiping down a Scotch glass. The woman is wearing a bandanna on her head and a blue tank top, her arms covered with tattoos. Beautiful dolphins and birds, clouds in the background. Thin, thin arms. Flat stomach. She looks both strong and frail, as she leans on her elbows, as though she were used to it—never moving toward anyone, letting them come to her.

“We’re not open until six,” she says.

“Oh, I’m not here to eat.”

“Then we’re definitely not open,” she says.

And she smiles when she says it, but it is more of a half smirk, and Maggie takes in the rest of her face: the olive skin and eyes, pouty lips, all of which stop Maggie for a second and make her take a longer look, as if it is her job to catch it. Whatever she thinks she is missing.

“I know you’re setting up, but I was just hoping to speak with Ryan . . .” She realizes she doesn’t know her last name—Ryan’s last name—which is when she realizes it could be Huntington. Whoever this Ryan is, her last name could be Huntington. She could still share that with Nate, too. Maggie catches the menu out of the corner of her eye. On the bottom it says
Executive Chef
. And, blessedly, it says that her name isn’t Huntington. It’s Engle. Ryan Engle.

“Engle,” she says. “I’m looking for Ryan Engle.”

The woman puts the glass down, takes out another one, and pours two glasses of Hendrick’s gin. “Are you here to ask her for a donation or help with a charity drive?”