Good Riddance

by Elinor Lipman

  “Pete did look a little shell-shocked. I think he was planning on this event doing double duty—as in ‘A big round of applause for my illegitimate daughter at table one!’”

  “You and me both. When my dad told him to scram, we were about thirty seconds away from being the subject of a boozy toast. That did it.” Our floor number pinged. I said, “He’ll get over it. He’s known me for about a minute in the great scheme of things. And now he’s got two stepdaughters he can daddy.”

  I took my shoes off as soon as we stepped out of the elevator onto the carpeted hallway. “You know what I think?” Jeremy asked.

  I said no, tell me.

  “I think he’s in love with you.”

  I emitted an automatic yuck and eeew, but what I was really focusing on was Does Jeremy think of me as a woman whom a handsome state senator would be in love with?

  “Aren’t you supposed to look a lot like your mother, the alleged love of his life?”

  Oh, that. “Some people think so.”

  I took the plastic key card from my tiny satin purse, opened the door, closed the curtains, and turned on the overhead light. Jeremy turned it off.

  I said, “You’re not going to be able to find the buttons that need unbuttoning.”

  That seemed to be his cue to pat me here and there, pretending it was too dark to know breast from clavicle.

  “They’re on the upper back, remember?”

  “Got ’em. But I’m noting that they don’t serve any real purpose. And there’s a zipper. Do you want me to unzip you, too?”

  “As long as you’re there, sure.”

  I could feel my dress opening wider. Then noticeably closer to my ear: “Your bra seems to have an excessive number of hooks. Should I help with that, or do you want to take care of it yourself?”

  “That depends . . .”

  He dropped his hands. “I sense you have a speech you’d like to make.”

  I did, one I’d been preparing since seeing the size of the room we’d been assigned. I held on to the slipping bodice of my dress for dignity’s sake, then began. “I know when we first met, and I had a martini, I was ultracool, very cavalier, about jumping into bed with you. It was like I was experimenting, trying to be the kind of woman who could have casual sex with someone she’d just met. No emotional investment.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But now, if I’m being very honest, which I probably shouldn’t be, I have an emotional investment. And if this thing now went from unbuttoning and unzipping to sleeping together, and if we had sex, would it be accidental because we were side by side and naked? I also have to ask if you have a girlfriend. And would you wake up all sorry because you were cheating on she who must not be named?”

  Now, having turned me around, and counting on three fingers, he said, “No. No. And no.”

  I shimmied, dress halfway down, over to the bureau and took a sip of our stolen wine straight from the bottle. “Okay, but what about this? Would it be sex for old times’ sake . . . or would we be back together?”

  “You’re such an idiot,” he said.

  “In a good way?”

  “In a way good enough that made me miss it.”

  I offered him the bottle. Before taking a swig, he said, “And for the record, Tina and I never had sex.”

  “But . . .” I had to search for whatever was left that I hadn’t exhausted. “Even so, she’s around. Your bikes are stored side by side. And isn’t it true that a woman could get the idea that casual dates might qualify someone as her boyfriend?”

  “If you’d ever had to talk about sustainability over dinner, you wouldn’t have to ask.”

  Because those words had been spoken with his lips on my neck, I didn’t pursue the Tina topic any further. I didn’t need to. I’d stepped out of the gauzy puddle that was my dress. And somehow, without my help, Jeremy’s trousers and boxers were no longer confining his responsive lower body.

  I said, “I have to get something in my cosmetics bag. I brought them just in case.”

  When I came out of the bathroom, he was in bed. I joined him. He wasn’t a handsome specimen, but he was beautiful.

  39

  Mind If I Take a Few Pictures?

  Not that I’d slept well, having fallen, postcoitally, into a pinch-me state of best-case insomnia. Jeremy, though, was dozing between my conversational pinball. I had to ask, didn’t I, about the hiatus he’d initiated—the why of it, and whether the breakup helped us get to where we were now?

  He murmured, facing the viny wallpaper, “Izznit obvious we broke up ’cuz I was falling in love with you?”

  That made me hitch myself up on my elbows to ask, “How does that make sense? Continue, please.”

  “Tomorrow . . .”

  “Now, please.”

  He turned back in my direction. “Okay. I was twenty-five. I thought: Twenty. Fucking. Five. She’s been married and divorced. I never even came close. Maybe I need to get out there.”

  “Out there? You work on a TV show surrounded by beautiful actresses”—but that’s where I stopped, reminding myself that he was testifying as to why he was lying next to me, not why he was plotting his escape. Of course, I couldn’t leave it there. “Can I play devil’s advocate, against my own self-interest?”

  “Sure—” he said, followed by a fake snore.

  “It was a pretty short break. You didn’t go off for a year like a Mormon missionary to a foreign land.”

  “Very true but not what I’d call an apt analogy.”

  “I just meant you had a little PG fling, then you came back. After only—what was it, two months?”

  “It looked like two months. I was back before that. In spirit. Mentally.”

  I did know that. Who wouldn’t have noticed his non-disappearance, his checking in? I thought it only right to say, “The falling in love part? I had that, too.”

  No answer, just some murmured syllables. Was he back asleep? I asked if we were going public.

  “I think we have.”

  “I don’t mean at the wedding. I mean if the play got produced, can we put an extra little spin on ‘collaborators’ so people get that we’re together?”

  “Sure.”

  I moved my pillow closer so we’d be falling asleep ear to ear. I said, “Have I told you yet that I find you delightful?”

  “Thank you. I try.”

  “And one more thing: When I said I’d also fallen in love—did that sound like I was speaking in the past tense?”

  “I can’t say I noticed the tense—”

  “I may not have said it aloud lately. Like tonight. By which I mean the love part. Because it’s extremely present tense.”

  “Thank you. Now go to sleep.” He reached over and found a thigh to pat.

  A few minutes later, I heard a faint “You looked beautiful tonight.” Was he in REM sleep already, delivering a line of dialogue meant for Veronica or Betty or even the hateful Cheryl Blossom, Riverdale’s villain? I didn’t nudge him to ask, Were you speaking to me? I accepted the compliment, silently for once, smiling in the dark.

  On the ride to Pickering, borrowing from a Riverdale voice-over, Jeremy intoned, “This story is about a town, once fulsome and innocent, now forever changed by the disappearance and eventual murder of a cherished yearbook.” Earlier, I’d woken up thinking that our one-woman show was doable, or at least no longer the worst idea I’d ever heard. I could imagine myself reciting lines on stage in front of pixelated images of the town. Life had sorted itself out, and I was turning into an excellent tour guide.

  First stop on this unseasonably warm March day was a no-brainer: the high school, built in 1920, with its flag pole, its bronze memorial plaque to fallen graduates, its double-wide doors painted so many times that their high-gloss black finish was crackled. Now that PHS was a regional high school, the word PICKERING had disappeared from above the door. I reminded Jeremy that he could blow up the yearbook’s black-and-white photo, which would look appropriately anti
quey and—whoops. Maybe not.

  “As if I didn’t ask the mayor’s mother and that guy who told us a dozen times that he’d driven all the way from Buffalo to attend the wedding—which he wouldn’t have missed for the world because he’d played water polo with Pete—if I could borrow their yearbook for a project I was working on.”

  “And when they heard you were an actor, they said, ‘Oh, boy. You bet.’”

  “Just about.”

  “Clever.”

  “And if they don’t come through, I’ll put an ad in the Pickering Sentinel offering to buy a 1968 yearbook.”

  Once again, I expressed regret over my impulsive shredding.

  “Don’t worry. That bag of shreds could open the show, as a prop, I mean. Where to now?”

  I drove to the first house I lived in, 198 Front Street, and the second house, from age six to eighteen, at 55 Olde Coach Road. I said, “We should ask permission first. A neighbor is probably taking down our license plate and calling the police as we speak.”

  “So we do what?”

  I got out of the car and, at both locations, rang the doorbell, introduced myself, and said, “I used to live here. Do you mind if I take a few pictures—just the outside?”

  Both owners said, “Fine, take what you need,” without even the slightest curiosity about why. Jeremy noted, “It’s like ‘Maritch’ is the golden ticket. Is there anyone here who didn’t go to the high school?”

  The owner at Olde Coach Road had bought the house from my dad only a year before. She felt compelled to question whether the master bathroom’s tub had drained as slowly during our tenure as it was draining now. I told her to use a plunger, like she would for a toilet. Worked like a charm for us. Photo okay? I asked again. “I’m documenting my life.”

  “Oh, sure. Good luck with that.”

  Next, the public library and the Knights of Columbus Hall where the eventful reunion took place, then moody shots of goalposts and empty bleachers, then the bandstand on the town green and the former Nagle’s department store, now a branch of New Hampshire Technical Institute.

  “Any other place that still speaks to you? A high school hangout?”

  That led us to the Rialto, no longer a movie theater but an indoor flea market on weekends, marquee intact and proclaiming OVER 50 BOOTHS! Then, a few miles out of town, to the Ice Cream Barn, closed for the season, but not an inch of it changed, its perennial flavors posted on wooden slats. I said, “I used to get either rum raisin or burnt sugar. The scoops were huge,” which led Jeremy to make a note.

  At the town’s only red light, he asked, “How far a drive to the motel where your mother hooked up with Armstrong?”

  “Forget that! My father’s coming to this show, and I’d prefer if he didn’t leave in the middle. Promise me you’re not writing a slutty-mom part.”

  “I’m not. Besides, you’re the boss. You’re the one delivering the lines, which should take your slutty mother and the question of your paternity off the table.”

  “My paternity is no longer a question, remember? I fixed that. Done. Over.”

  “Got it. Your dad is your dad.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Except . . . he knows he’s not.”

  “Immaterial! My birth certificate says ‘Thomas Maritch” next to ‘father,’ and you can take that to the bank.”

  “Along with the fantasy DNA test.”

  “No comment,” I said.

  Our last stop was the extant Pretty Good Diner, where we had weak coffee in thick mugs and shared a grilled cheese-and-tomato sandwich. Jeremy was charmed by the multipage laminated menu with “International Specialties” (lasagna, moussaka, French onion soup, chili con carne) and “All desserts homemade except the chocolate pudding.” We ordered frappes, one vanilla, one chocolate, aka “milkshakes,” an homage to everyone’s favorite beverage at Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe on Riverdale.

  I took at least a half-dozen selfies with the two of us practically cheek to cheek, achievable because we were occupying the same side of the booth. As soon as we’d placed our order, Jeremy walked to the juke box and spent a long time there. When he returned, it was with a sly grin, attributable, he said, to the bargain rate of four songs for a dollar. But then he sat opposite me, looking unusually solemn, taking my hands across the table, clinically, in the manner of a bearer of bad news.

  “Are you—?”

  “Shhh, listen,” he said.

  What then filled the Pretty Good were love songs of the seriously earnest kind—classics—by the Righteous Brothers, then Paul McCartney, then Roberta Flack.

  And finally—oh, God—the late, great Whitney Houston belting out what I now call our anthem. Was Jeremy even born when she recorded “I Will Always Love You”?

  40

  Pie in the Sky?

  All was good—so good that we were soon referring to my apartment as the guest room/Airbnb/storage facility across the hall.

  After much beseeching, Jeremy gave me a sneak preview of the as-yet-untitled draft. Very wisely, he’d repurposed Geneva as a man, moved her/him from Manhattan to Pickering, where he drove around town on garbage day, salvaging things like used furniture and tin cans, except one lucky day—or so he thought—when he came upon a dog-eared, overly notated high school yearbook.

  And that so-called Eugene Palumbo had a son who was graduating from Emerson College and needed a topic for his senior thesis in documentary filmmaking. Could anyone guess the real-life identity of the villain from this setup? Surely only Geneva.

  I still had to worry about the rest of it, which was the Daphne story nibbling around the edges of my mother’s infidelity. Jeremy had done a good job covering my marriage and divorce: how I met Holden (now Chauncey) at the Registry of Motor Vehicles instead of CVS; how he courted and married me under false pretenses, driven by trust-fund greed.

  I didn’t mind that I came across as lovable-wacky, knocking on the playwright’s door the first minute I’d moved in, juggling plants, complaining about a yappy dog he didn’t own. Had he made notes of our early conversations, or did he have a recording device for an ear? He’d remembered the inedible wasabi truffles, the dialogue over the making and drinking of our first martini, then my free fall into easy virtue.

  Jeremy had me going to the reunion reluctantly, sitting with Peter—now named Dr. Brendan Carswell—along with fellow graduates, including Eugene Palumbo. The doctor asked me to dance, then told me he’d been in love with his teacher, my mother, since the first yearbook staff meeting.

  “Nope, we’re dropping that,” I told him.

  Jeremy explained that the Peter-Brendan digression was necessary. All drama needs tension, a will-she-or-won’t-she thread; in this case, will Daphne have to spend the rest of her life wondering if Dr. Carswell was telling the truth?

  “Since when is this a drama? What do I need tension for?”

  He shuffled some pages. “Give me a few days,” he said.

  I did. Before I read the new draft, he prefaced it with “I went a little meta.”

  The fix: He borrowed from his own show, echoing the Riverdale subplot in which Archie the high schooler has an affair with Miss Grundy, the music teacher. Jeremy made it sound as if he’d taken a flight of narrative fancy—that he, the love interest/actor across the hall, had conflated real life with television.

  “Wow. Not only does it work, but I think my dad could see this version of it.”

  “Yes, he will, and he’ll take a bow. First, we’ll enlist Kathi.”

  “For what?”

  “She’ll work the poetic-license angle—that what did or didn’t go on between your mother and Brendon Carswell is left to the audience’s imagination.”

  I said, “I don’t know . . .”

  “She’s been great. I can’t imagine her turning down that request.”

  “I’m just wondering if Kathi is a little sick of helping me lie to my dad.”

  We were side by side in his kitchen, him chopping vegetables, me sautéi
ng. There was a pause, his knife no longer hitting the cutting board, which is when he asked, “Did you ever wonder why your dad has to protect your mother? She cheated on him for who knows how long, and he took it. Maybe he’s been holding it in all these years. Maybe it would be therapeutic to come clean. Maybe he’d like the world to know the real June Maritch—”

  “No! What happened is so embarrassing—she was the teacher, he was the principal, she ends up having an affair right under his nose, and he takes her back! If you think he’d like to air our dirty laundry, then you don’t know my dad.”

  “Sorry. Just had to ask.” He nudged me. “For art’s sake. And remember what we discussed in the car: This isn’t ventriloquism. You’re in charge. You’ll deliver only what you want the audience to hear.”

  What audience? I thought. Was this just pie in the sky? I did a little whining about how bad I was in acting class and how I dreaded the remaining lessons. Couldn’t I drop out now that I sort of had an acting job?

  “No, you’re sticking it out, and you’ll tell your thankless teacher that you’ve been cast as the lead in a show that’s in previews.”

  Sort of true. I was the one woman in a one-woman show. And who’s not to say that our repeated readings within these four walls weren’t previews? How’s this for the “reality of doing”? What had my instructor ever done anyway? Law & Order: SVU? What New York actor hadn’t? And the disrespectful way he talked over and around me when it came to lectures on the craft, he’d be lucky if we comped him a ticket.

  Geneva was still down the hall, surely seething over my act of treachery, but there was an unaccustomed lack of harassment. No emails, no pounding on my door, no summons from some administrative agency that handled alleged stolen property of questionable ownership. Yet we wondered: Could Jeremy and I produce a show on the down low? Could we write about my trials and tribulations without naming the cause of them?

  Unlike me, Jeremy didn’t feel the need to steer clear of her. He emailed, hinting he had something of a professional nature to discuss. She wrote back, “How’s tonight?”