“Well, then,” Ursula says. “That makes two of us.”
“Can I ask you a question?” Leland says.
“Sure,” Ursula says—but then the organ music starts and everyone in the church rises.
“We’ll save it for later,” Leland says.
At the graveside, Leland links her arm through Mallory’s. On Mallory’s left are Coop and Fray, Fray’s girlfriend, Anna, who looks nothing like the punk rocker Leland was promised, and Link. Leland’s mother, Geri, is on the opposite side of the two graves with her new boyfriend, John Smith, whom she met on Match.com. (Leland wants her mother to make sure that John Smith is in fact this guy’s name because it sounds like an alias, and John Smith has the bland looks and mild manner of someone who’s trying to erase an unsavory past. The last thing Leland wants to see is Geri duped by some scam artist who meets lonely divorcées on Match.com and then takes them for everything they’re worth.) Leland’s father and Sloane are standing behind Leland somewhere. It should be the other way around—Geri was Kitty’s best friend, so she should be standing on the side with the family while Steve and Sloane watch from afar, but Leland won’t say anything.
Kitty and Senior are dead. That’s all that matters.
The silver lining—and yes, Leland does know how egregious it is that she’s managed to find a silver lining at the funeral of her best friend’s parents—is that Leland now has Senator Ursula de Gournsey’s cell phone number and e-mail address. Ursula has graciously agreed to be interviewed for Leland’s Letter. Leland can’t believe it. It’s such a coup! She wants to tell Mallory, but naturally, it will have to wait.
After the burial, there’s a reception at the country club. It’s a reception worthy of Kitty Blessing—passed hors d’oeuvres (Leland recalls how much Kitty loved gooey Brie and chutney on a water cracker) and a buffet for three hundred that includes carving stations of ham and prime rib. There’s a chamber quartet and an open bar. It’s quite lovely and Leland marvels that Cooper and Mallory managed to arrange all this. She wonders if perhaps Kitty left the staff at the club pages of instructions and a blank check in case of her and Senior’s untimely demise. At least twice, Leland scans the room expecting to see Kitty. But that’s the thing about death—Kitty is no longer. Kitty and Senior are gone, they’re never coming back, and how is that possible? The rest of the world continues, the club is exactly the same, the Deckers and the Whipps are here—they’re talking with Geri and John Smith; no doubt they want to check out the new guy—plus every single person Leland and Mallory and Cooper and Fray knew growing up. All still alive, drinking white wine or bourbon or crisp martinis, plucking tiny crab cakes off passing trays, smearing Bremner wafers with Brie, willfully ignoring the fact that someday they, too, will die and everyone will cry, then hit the raw bar.
Ursula de Gournsey is not at the reception. She had a four o’clock meeting back at the Capitol, she said. The mere phrase back at the Capitol made Leland’s nipples harden. She loves powerful women.
Leland had realized, sort of, that Cooper’s friend Jake, whom Leland had dinner with decades ago on Nantucket, was married to Ursula de Gournsey, but that still didn’t prepare Leland for finding the woman standing in front of her in the receiving line. UDG may not be the most powerful woman in politics—there’s Hillary, Palin, Pelosi, and Feinstein—but she is certainly a media darling. Luckily, Leland has always been good at thinking on her feet. Leland’s Letter, tens of thousands of subscribers, ninety-eight percent women, eighty-five percent college-educated, meaningful content across a wide spectrum, would love to interview you, let my readers get a woman-to-woman understanding of you, wouldn’t take much time at all, a concise phone call, I’m not interested in wasting anyone’s time, not yours, not mine.
The no-time-wasted line seemed to secure Ursula’s interest. Sounds good, she said. Here’s my contact info. Hand on Leland’s arm. And thank you for being so kind to me.
“Would you please get me another?” Mallory asks as she hands Leland her empty martini glass. “Dirty. As dirty as Bridger will make it, plisssss.”
“And how about some water, Mal?” Leland says. The reception is winding down. Steve and Sloane are—weirdly? miraculously?—driving Geri and John home. The loss of the Blessings has apparently softened her parents’ utter disdain of each other and now they’re all chummy. Or maybe not. Maybe Geri just wants to smooch with John Smith in the back seat to prove some kind of twisted point.
“I’ll drink water later,” Mallory says. “Right now, I’m drinking gin.”
Leland obliges, asking Mr. Bridger the bartender—he’s been at the club for so long that Leland remembers him making her Shirley Temples—for a dirty martini. “Really dirty, Mallory said, whatever that means.”
Mr. Bridger shakes his head and says, “Damn shame.” He means the Blessings, not Mallory’s drink order—she thinks. When Mr. Bridger hands Leland the cloudy drink with three olives speared on a toothpick, he says, “You ever get married?”
“God, no!” Leland says with more gusto than she feels. She must be a little tipsy as well because she adds, “I was a lesbian for a while, you know. Now I don’t know what I am.” Lonely is the answer, Leland thinks. She’s lonely. She would be self-conscious about this except for the fact that both Mallory and Cooper are single too. Cooper is four times divorced. Four times! And Mallory just never got married. She had a baby with Fray, but Mallory and Fray weren’t a couple for even five minutes. Mallory dates guys on Nantucket, or at least Leland thinks she does. It seems odd. Mallory is so pretty and so smart; she would be a catch for any man. Leland thinks back to herself and Mallory playing records in Leland’s bedroom, stuffing socks into their bras and singing into their hairbrushes. Is there something wrong with them?
“Is there something wrong with us?” Leland asks later. They are in the Blessing house, in the “library,” which Kitty decorated like an English hunting lodge; there’s a print of a dead pheasant over the stone fireplace and an antique branding iron with the initials CB on the hearth next to a pair of leather bellows. Mallory and Leland are alone, sitting on the deep suede sofa. There’s a wet bar in the room so they can continue drinking at a brisk pace and there’s also a closet where Senior kept his stereo, a turntable, and his vinyl collection—Neil Sedaka, the Beach Boys, the Spinners. Mallory has put on the Beatles’ Revolver. Night has fallen early, as it does in late October. Mallory lit a fire, and there’s a lamp with a rosy shade in the corner. It’s cozy; they’re alone. Coop took Link to see Free Birds. He wanted to think about something else for a while, he said.
“Something wrong with us?” Mallory says.
“We never got married,” Leland says. “Fifi and I were together ten years, but…”
“Would you have married her if you could have back then?” Mallory asks. She’s down at the end of the sofa, her stocking feet resting on the coffee table. She’s drinking Tanqueray and tonic, because that’s what’s in her father’s bar.
“Fifi isn’t the marrying type,” Leland says. Even saying the woman’s name makes her throat ache.
“But she is the maternal type,” Mallory says.
Yes, Fifi now has a child, a son named Kilroy—conceived via sperm donor—who’s five. Every once in a while, Leland will see Fifi at literary events with Kilroy in tow, and Leland always leaves immediately. She yearns to have a conversation with Fifi but she refuses to be the one to initiate it. She can’t believe Fifi hasn’t called her or texted her to say congratulations on Leland’s Letter. Surely, she must know about it? Her friends and colleagues must be reading it? Leland has decided to just wait. Someday, Fifi will realize that she loves Leland and has always loved Leland. “I believe Fifi will be back in my life someday. Everything works out the way it’s supposed to, in the end.”
“Do you believe that?” Mallory asks. “Do you think my parents were supposed to be mowed down on the side of the road like…like possums or raccoons? Because that’s what they ended up as, you know, Lee. Roadk
ill.”
“It’s time for you to go to bed,” Leland says. “It’s been a long day. Where are the pills Dr. Roche gave you? You’re taking one and so am I.”
“I’m not ready for bed,” Mallory says. She sounds like she used to when she was nine years old and Senior and Kitty were enforcing their strict bedtime—eight o’clock on weeknights and nine o’clock on weekends. Leland started sleeping over here in third grade, though they would more often stay at Leland’s house because Leland had the downstairs rec room and the hot tub and the garage fridge filled with soda, plus Steve and Geri let her stay up as late as she wanted. But when Leland and Mallory entered high school, the pendulum swung back the other way and they would more often sleep here at the Blessings so they could see what Cooper and Frazier were doing. Fray had kissed Leland for the first time in the den of this house while they watched Flashdance.
Leland had forgotten about that.
“There’s something I want to tell you,” Mallory says, sitting up straight now. “It’s a secret. A real secret, the kind that nobody knows except for me and one other person.”
Leland knows she should stop Mallory from divulging a secret while completely blotto on the night of her parents’ funeral. What is Mallory about to say? That Kitty was having an affair with Mr. Bridger? That Senior was wanted by the FBI for tax fraud? Something about Cooper and one of his four ex-wives? They could hold an entire symposium on what’s up with Cooper.
“What is it?” Leland asks.
“You have to promise not to tell anyone.”
“I promise.” Leland says this in good faith, but, come on, they’re forty-four years old, so by now they realize that no secret in the history of the world has ever been successfully kept. The truth always comes out. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there are millions, indeed trillions, of secrets that get buried in dark, rectangular holes like the ones Kitty’s and Senior’s coffins were lowered into.
“I have a Same Time Next Year,” Mallory says.
Leland repeats the sentence in her brain, hoping it will make some sense. Nope. “Excuse me?”
“I have a person in my life,” Mallory says. “A man whom I see one weekend per year. Like in the movie Same Time, Next Year.”
Same Time, Next Year; Leland vaguely recalls it. Maybe Geri had it on one long-ago Sunday afternoon; maybe it was rainy and there was a chicken roasting in the oven for supper. Maybe Geri asked Leland to come watch with her for a minute and maybe Leland was young enough that she obliged her mother rather than running upstairs to listen to the weekly countdown on 98 Rock as she finished her homework or write notes to pass to her friends the next morning in the hallway. Maybe she came in a third of the way through—the man, Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, was wearing a wide-collared jacket and a string of beads to indicate that he was a new-age enlightened man of the 1970s. Maybe Geri had explained the premise—this seemingly normal, suburban-looking couple meet for a fling one weekend per year over the course of decades, and as the times change, so do they.
Maybe Geri had said, It sounds like a heavenly arrangement, actually.
“Wait a minute,” Leland says. “You do?”
“I do. And I’m in love with him. I’ve always been in love with him. But it’s contained, like in a hermetically sealed box. It has never leaked out into real life. It’s come close. But yeah, me and him, one weekend a year, for a long time now. And nobody knows but me and him. And now you.”
“Why are you telling me?” Leland says. She’s not sure there’s such a thing as a relationship that exists in a hermetically sealed box. “Was he at the funeral?”
“No.”
“Does he know about your parents?”
“He must.”
“He must?”
“I’m telling you because I need to confess,” Mallory says. “I know it’s stupid, but a part of me believes…” She scrunches her eyes up and emits a couple of throaty sobs. Poor Mal. They’re sitting in the library with their drinks in Senior and Kitty’s house but Senior and Kitty are in coffins in the ground. Leland leans over and puts an arm around Mallory’s back.
“It’s okay, Mal,” she says.
Mallory shakes her head. She’s all clogged up. Leland hurries to the powder room for tissues. She’s been a half-hearted friend to Mallory since the beginning, always believing for some reason that she was superior and therefore didn’t have to try as hard, but now she wants to make up for it. If Mallory feels like she has to confess about her Same Time Next Year, then fine. Leland will accept the information without judgment.
Mallory mops her face with a tissue, gets in a couple clear breaths, composes herself somewhat. “Part of me believes that what happened to Kitty and Senior is my fault. Because of this thing I’ve been doing.” She pauses. “The other person, the man…he’s married.”
“Well, yeah,” Leland says. “I figured. Otherwise…I mean, if he weren’t married, you two would just be together all the time. Or more frequently. But whatever, Mal. What happened to your parents was a random, stupid, senseless accident. It doesn’t have anything to do with this other thing. I can assure you of that.”
“But you can’t assure me.”
Leland takes her friend’s hand. “Tell me about him. If no one else knows about him, then you must have a bunch of pent-up stuff you’ve been waiting to share.”
“Not really,” Mallory says. “In some ways, there isn’t enough to share. He comes every year, we do the same things, we have a sort of routine—the things we eat, the songs we listen to—and then he leaves.”
“You don’t call him?” Leland says. “You don’t text him?”
Mallory shakes her head.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It’s even harder to do than to believe,” Mallory says.
“And you see him every year? What about Link?”
“He’s always with Fray when this person comes,” Mallory says. “It’s at the end of the summer.”
Leland is starting to picture it: A sun-soaked weekend, just Mallory and her mystery dream man in that romantic cottage on the beach. They make love and feed each other fresh figs and sing along to the Carpenters and then he leaves; Mallory stands in the doorway, blowing him kisses. They flip the hourglass over again.
It sounds like a heavenly arrangement, actually.
“Still, it’s amazing, right, that you’ve never missed a year? Does his wife know?”
Mallory shakes her head. “His wife…I can’t even get into everything about his wife.” She drops her voice. “She came to the funeral. By herself.”
“She…what?” Leland says. And suddenly, she pulls away from Mallory, just a few inches, nothing dramatic, but she needs space. The wife came to the funeral alone. Every year for a long time now. How long? Since the beginning, when Mallory inherited the cottage? Leland hadn’t planned on asking the guy’s name because she wanted to respect Mallory’s privacy and also because she’d assumed it was someone she didn’t know.
The end of summer.
Leland racks her brain to remember her visit that first summer. They had surprised Fray, that she remembers, and she and Fray had nearly hooked up. Cooper was there, and his friend from Hopkins, Jake McCloud. What does Leland remember about Jake? Aaaaarrrgh! Very little. If he hadn’t ended up marrying Ursula de Gournsey, he would have been erased from Leland’s memory forever.
But he had ended up marrying Ursula de Gournsey.
Who came to the funeral by herself. Why? Why had she been at the funeral without Jake when Jake was the one who was friends with Coop? “Is it Jake McCloud?” Leland whispers.
Mallory releases a breath.
“Oh my God, Mal.”
“I know.”
“Mal.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“In the spirit of full disclosure…” Leland says.
Mallory looks up.
“I sat with Ursula at the service. I was shocked to see her, obviously. And this might sound horrible—no, it defin
itely will sound horrible—but I got her e-mail and her cell phone number. I asked her if she would do an interview for Leland’s Letter and she said yes.”
“Oh, Lee.”
“I’m sorry, I had no idea. But yes, I am that friend who took full advantage of your parents’ funeral to further her own career. It’s just…I didn’t know.”
“But you know now,” Mallory says. “So, please…”
Please what? Leland wonders. Mallory doesn’t say anything else. Her head falls back against the sofa and her eyes close. Leland considers trying to get Mallory upstairs to her childhood bedroom but it feels like an impossible task. She covers Mallory with the deep red chenille blanket that has lived in this room for as long as Leland can remember and then she succumbs to the allure of the other half of the sofa.
So, please…what? Leland thinks as she falls asleep.
Leland wants to do an extended interview with Ursula de Gournsey, but because of the situation with Mallory, she decides it’s best not to dive too deeply into Ursula’s life. Instead, she features Ursula in her Dirty Dozen—twelve questions, some rapid-fire and fun, some provocative. Turns out, this suits Ursula better, anyway. She doesn’t have time for Leland to do a detailed profile.
Twelve questions is a lot, Ursula says. She hopes they can blow through them in thirty minutes, forty-five tops.
“Or I could e-mail them to you?” Leland says. “So you have time to mull them over?”
“It’ll go straight into the black hole,” Ursula says. “This isn’t constituent business or legislation, which makes it personal, and my personal business gets triaged last. Let’s do this now. Go ahead.”
Leland’s Letter
Dirty Dozen with Senator Ursula de Gournsey
1. Gadget you can’t live without?
There’s a pause on the other end of the phone.
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