Time of My Life Page 8

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jack was saying, while I was reading our cab driver’s license, flattened against the plastic partition that separated the front from the back, and wondering if the driver had left his family behind in whatever country he hailed from to come here and make a better world for them. His taxi reeked of evergreen air freshener, and I hoped the scent wouldn’t attach itself to my pores and stay with me once we had vacated the vehicle.

  “Out of the cab?” I asked, turning toward Jack. “We still have fifteen blocks to go.”

  “No. Out of here here.” He waved his hands. “Let’s plan a trip.”

  “That’s not going to resolve everything with my mother,” I sighed. I’d told Jack about my mom’s note earlier that afternoon, and he’d reacted as he had the last time I’d been through this—with his cocksure nonchalance, which I sometimes found irritating, but which I now envied.

  “Of course it’s not going to resolve everything with your mother,” Jack said, folding his hand over mine. “But it could still be a hell of a lot of fun. And that’s the point.” He squeezed my fingers and smiled. “October, maybe? Miami?”

  “I thought you had a writer’s retreat in October. To work on your novel.”

  Jack’s eyebrows darted downward.

  “I mentioned that to you?” His voice was flat, and I did my mental rewind to see where I’d gone wrong.

  Er, no, come to think of it, you hadn’t mentioned it to me. I only know about it because when we broke up, you cocooned yourself in the Adirondacks under the guise of writing, when what you were really doing was nurturing festering wounds that our split had left on both of us.

  “Um.” My brain raced. “I saw something you’d gotten in the mail about it . . . figured you would go.”

  But it wasn’t just my slipup that sucked the enthusiasm from his tone. It was the mentioning of that-of-which-we-shall-not-speak. His novel. I’d pushed him on it last time. At Vivian’s behest that, indeed, her son was the next coming of Hemingway, I’d pushed him. Never considering that Jack’s talent wasn’t anything grander than any other average MFA student or that his passion for supposed skill was significantly outweighed by his mother’s. I pushed him and cajoled him and hammered out hours in which I insisted that he write, and he would—I’d hear the spatter of the computer keyboard rattling out like machine-gun fire—but the more he wrote, the less shiny he became, as if the work itself drained out all of his joy. So this time around, I nudged less and intuited more and realized that perhaps Jack wasn’t destined to be the next great writer, which, of course, was entirely fine with me. As long as he cared about being the next great something. Whatever that might be.

  “Oh,” Jack said toward the glass taxi partition, with a sharpness that could puncture a balloon, but hesitatingly accepting the explanation. “No, I’d rather go to Miami.”

  “Sounds like heaven to me,” I said hurriedly, brushing past the indiscretion and hopeful that we could move beyond it entirely. Let Vivian be the one to prod him, I thought. I’ll just be here to ride along and inhale the wind as we go. Because that’s what I enjoyed most about Jack now: the ride, how smooth and seamless and easy it all felt when I jumped onboard.

  “So where is your mom now?” Jack said, switching back to a seemingly less dodgy subject, though, I think, it’s only less dodgy for him. For me, it awoke reams of dormant emotions that I thought might nearly strangle me.

  “Here, I think, I mean, at least from her area code. She must be here.” I looked out the streaked window of the cab and wondered how often I’ve walked by her apartment, how many times I’ve just barely missed her at the grocery store or the gym or the dry cleaner. How long she’s known where I’ve been and that I was so close to her grasp. I shook my head.

  “It’s been almost eighteen years,” I stated, more to myself than to Jack. “I don’t think I have much to say to her. I didn’t even know if she was alive. I sort of figured that she wasn’t, since she’d never popped back up.”

  The truth was that when my mother hightailed it out of the family, when she left us a flimsy note that literally read good-bye, and when Andy, my brother, and I ran to her closets to find them barren, I never really looked for her. I prayed for her return, yes, but I was nine, and after I hand-scrawled signs that I’d planned to stick up on telephone poles around the neighborhood, and after my father gently suggested that she wasn’t “missing” in the way that the signs implied, I simply gave up. After six months, I even stopped praying that she’d come back. She’d run away, and far be it from me to try to rein her back in, like a kite tangled in a tree. Instead of asking God to return her to us, I littered my prepubescent mind with various reasons that she’d left us: I hadn’t been grateful enough for my ninth birthday party; I’d gotten a B in geography; she was always asking me to clean up my room, and I rarely, if ever, tidied to her satisfaction. And soon enough, I bathed myself with sadness and guilt, and knew that she wasn’t coming back because I’d pushed her away, and why would she want to return to such a spoiled, rotten kid who wasn’t thankful enough for her parties and couldn’t be bothered to put back her My Little Ponies? My father promised me that this wasn’t so; he called me into our molasses-colored den after dinner one night and kindly and firmly told me that this wasn’t so, but mostly he, too, squirreled into his pain, and his silences offered little reassurance.

  But eventually, as my preteen years gave way to more deductive teenage ones, I grew hostile, bitter, resentful at her departure, and I vowed to erase her from my space entirely. Which, most days, when I wasn’t letting her betrayal define me, I managed to do quite well.

  So no, I didn’t realize that she lived within miles of me and that conceivably, she’d never really gone that far to begin with.

  “Well, maybe you should call her. I don’t know. It’s up to you,” Jack said to me tonight, as the taxi pulls to an abrupt stop at a yellow light.

  Of course it’s up to me! I almost snapped, then realize that it wasn’t him that I’m mad at. It was just my initial inclination, to mount an overwhelming defense of my actions because I’d spent so many years doing so with Henry, who never understood, who, in his own words, couldn’t understand, how I could let my mother slip away after decades of not knowing her.

  “You’re crazy not to track her down,” he’d say, over pasta or when I’d finally soothed Katie to bed or when I was stretching after a power walk, ambushing me with the subject when I was least prepared.

  “How would I be crazy not to?” I’d always retort back, once I’d caught my breath at the surprise attack. “Here is a woman who has wanted no part of my life, who decided that I’d be better off without a mother than with her as my mother, and gave me no say in the matter, and now, she wants back in? I think I’d be crazy to give her that chance.”

  “She’s your mother!” Henry would say, his voice boiling with judgment. “Isn’t that worth something?”

  I’d seethe silently and exit the room, fleeing both my husband who didn’t know what was best for me and the skeletons that he’d insist on digging back up.

  So tonight, with Jack, it’s hard not to rage at his innocuous reply, even though I know that he doesn’t fault me for my choice. Hell, I’m not even sure how much my choice registers with him. He was so tied to his mother that, I think in the cab, he just doesn’t get it, would never get the fury and the devastation that comes from abandonment. But he didn’t get it in an entirely different way from Henry. Henry got it—he got how she scarred me—and yet he still chose to tirelessly push me to make different choices. Jack just breezed right by it because the pain was so beyond his scope of recognition, and now, in the cab, I am relieved, grateful for this, because it absolves me of the anguish of rehashing a dead situation.

  Before I can think any further, we’re at Cipriani, and I step past the pigeon, and Jack takes my hand, and we pretend that the tiny fissures that were microscopically exposed in the cab—my mother, his ambition—aren’t part of a larger prob
lem between two people who fail to understand the intricacies of the other.

  With nothing else to do, we step forward, onward, and away we go.

  A WAITER GREETS US with drinks (rum and Coke!) and pushes open the grand, gilded doors. The cavernous space, which could easily hold a thousand guests, had been overhauled to resemble a botanical garden. Hundreds upon hundreds of rose petals had been strung from each chandelier, so the room not only smells like the first rites of spring but it also looks like perhaps Dali’s interpretation of an arboretum: blossoming stems cascading down from the ceiling, jutting into themselves and over us, illuminated by twinkling white lights that glisten like polka-dotting stars through the branches. Towering statues composed entirely of fruits of the season—pine-apples, peaches, pears, and oranges—adorn each cocktail table, and the splatter of color, coupled with the crisp burnt-orange tablecloths, bounces off the stark rose petals, and truly, I feel as if I’ve stepped into the Garden of Eden.

  “Who do you know here?” Jack shouts in my ear, trying to make conversation above the din of the swing band at the back of the room and the clatter of hundreds of other voices, all equally elevated in an attempt to be heard.

  “No one, really,” I shout back.

  We both stare blankly at the buzzing hive of partygoers until, miraculously, I spy Josie through a wall of people. I grab Jack’s hand and push my way past gesturing limbs, wafts of perfume, and hoards of jewels until we land smack in front of her.

  “Oh good! Jillian! Perfect timing,” she exclaims. “The Coke team is right over there, and I want to introduce you.”

  “I’ll be at the bar,” Jack says, winking and flashing a grin. He’d befriend more people there by the time he’d ordered his drink than I would at this entire party.

  Josie pulls me by the crook of my arm to a group of forty-something-looking men who appear nearly interchangeable, with their navy pin-striped suits and their freshly shaven cheeks that glow with a hint of Hampton’s summer sun and their cackle of laughter that implies that someone just told an entirely inappropriate joke.

  “Gentlemen, excuse us,” Josie says. “I want you to meet the brains behind your new ad campaign. Jillian, meet the men for whom you’re about to make a lot of money.”

  She smiles, and I notice for the first time how pretty she looks tonight. Less washed out, with just enough blush to illuminate her cheekbones and a smattering of lipstick to fashion a pout. Her hair, normally tied back into a floppy bun, cascades below her shoulders and over her red A-line dress that’s staid enough for an executive but flashy enough for a still-under-forty woman who wants to be noticed.

  I hold out my hand and grasp the bear claw grips of the senior Coke managers, regaling them with my ideas and delightful small talk and filling the silences with witty double entendres that easily outmatch their macho humor that was being batted around before Josie and I burst their boys-only bubble.

  They finally beg an exit to hit the bar, and Josie and I watch them go.

  “You know Bart, the one you just met with the purple tie?” she asks. “I dated him in college. We broke up when he moved to San Francisco after we graduated.”

  “Oh,” I reply because I have nothing else to say. Then I add, “He’s cute.”

  “He is, isn’t he?” Her voice is too wistful for a woman who doesn’t have regrets.

  “Where’s Art tonight? Home with the kids?” I ask.

  “No.” She shakes her head. “He got a last-minute gig in San Jose.” She half snorts but the anger behind it belies her mock amusement. “Emergency on an opera set out there.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “No, really,” she says. “You know: faulty candelabras and curtains that just won’t behave themselves.” She starts to laugh, slowly, sadly at first, then accelerating until she’s curled over her left side, holding up her rum and Coke in her right hand so it won’t topple on the floor, shaking, shuddering uncontrollably until she finally rights herself and wipes away her tears. “A fucking opera set emergency! Can you imagine?” she sputters again, but pulls herself in and tucks away any remnants of laughter with a firm sigh. “So yeah, there’s Bart—here, now, reminding me of . . . so much . . . and then . . .” she pauses, “there’s Art.”

  “Separated by only a ‘B,’ ” I offer, trying a little levity.

  “If only,” she responds dejectedly while scanning the crowd in hopes of catching Bart’s eye all over again. “So what about you and Jack? Engagement anytime soon?”

  No, I think, then remind myself that this future is yet untold.

  “Maybe,” I say instead. “We’ll see. I guess it’s up to him.”

  “Why would you say that?” Josie tenses and turns toward me. “It’s up to both of you.”

  Not really, I want to burst. Last time I gave myself to him for two fucking years and yet nothing, just more of the same old Jack, coasting along comfortably at cruising altitude. No ring, no hints, no squat, so when it finally became apparent that we were treading water rather than swimming toward something, I bolted. Because that was my only choice, my only say. I left him before he could leave me or at least until I wasted the better part of my misspent adult years, because I had no reason to believe that there was anything more he was willing to swim toward anyway.

  Tonight, I shrug. “I just meant that he’s the one who proposes, that’s all.”

  Josie shrugs back, a tacit admission that indeed I might be stuck, and then surveys the scene looking for her own lost ghosts. I glance around, swiveling my head in search of a familiar face, and then I see one.

  We lock eyes, and he moves toward me, hacking through the thicket of partygoers, he moves right toward me.

  It’s Henry, of course. Here and now, present and past. Why did I ever believe that I could stop the collision of time?

  MY FEET ARE seemingly made of lead. I want to move them. I so urgently want to raise them and flee, and yet, I cannot.

  He is getting closer, and I’m starting to panic. I’m not ready for this! I am supposed to have my sweet time with Jackson, figuring out the Henry question when I’m ready to figure it out! I feel a flare of hives snare itself around my neck, marring my collarbone like a Jackson Pollock painting and clashing with the starkness of my silver strapless dress.

  He is moving in slow motion, and I see the flop of his deep-sandy hair ride over his forehead, and he reaches up to push it back out of his eyes. As I learn to love him, I discover that this is his tell: the sign that he’s nervous or bluffing or, occasionally, lying. Not that I’d catch him lying all that often, but yes, sometimes, I’d trap him in one. That he had to stay late for work, when, in fact, he was golfing at our club; I’d hear about it two days later when Ainsley and I would take the kids for a toddler swim, and the valet might mention it in passing. Or that he hand-selected my ruby anniversary bracelet, which he’d present to me over merlot and candles at the finest restaurant in Rye, only to have his secretary ask, with her tongue so planted in her cheek it’s remarkable that she can speak at all, how I enjoyed the gift that Henry picked out. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. She’d emphasize the “Henry,” just in case I hadn’t picked up on the insinuation.

  Tonight, he is nearly in front of me, again, swatting at his hair, attempting to tuck a strand that’s too long to hang properly yet too short to reach his ear, into place, when my brain finally connects to my legs. I turn to go, desperately, urgently, but there is literally no place to run. Around me, clusters of hobnobbers block my way, like brick walls on all sides, and the only viable exit is directly where he is coming from. I look to Josie beside me for help, but she has long since faded on me, wistfully sipping her rum and dreaming of her youth while scanning—still scanning—for Bart.

  Too soon, and finally, he is here.

  “You’re the girl from the bus, right?” he says, smiling and extending his free hand. The band has stopped playing, and a buzz of electric silence fills the dead space.

  “What are you doing here?” I reply
. It’s out too fast for me to take it back. But of course, Henry’s not supposed to be here. This isn’t where we meet. This isn’t how it all plays out. In a flash, I wonder how many near misses I’ve had with Henry in my former life . . . if he were someone whom I’d see around my neighborhood, at the grocery store, in the gym, on the bus, who just went unnoticed or to whom I’d occasionally nod, but who wasn’t meant to play any significant role in my life other than a familiar face with whom I would exchange glances from time to time in passing.

  “Uh, excuse me?” He tries to take a step back, but instead, just elbow jousts with someone behind him, and finds himself on the losing end.

  “I . . . just . . .” I find that I’m unable to speak. Henry. Henry! This is what he looked like when we met, I think. His eyes are still drowned with hope. His teeth seem whiter, his posture taller. No fine lines creaking into his forehead or around his eyes. Everything about his veneer seems glossier, more vibrant. Was I the reason you lost that? I wonder. Or do I simply not notice anymore?

  “Should I not be here?” he asks, perplexed.

  “Er, no. I’m sorry.” My tongue feels scrambled. “It came out wrong.” It came out exactly right! What are you doing here?

  “Well, to answer your question, my company is a major shareholder in Coke, so, that’s why I’m here. And you?”

  It occurs to me suddenly that Henry has every right to be here. He might have even been here seven years ago. It’s me; I’m the one who has changed things, who has inserted herself into places I haven’t previously been. I’m the one who is new here.

  “I, uh, I do their advertising.” I stare at my hands rather than into his eyes, which feel like phantoms bearing down on me.

  At this exact moment, Jack reappears, squeezing his way between two women who appear to be as bored as I am frantic.