That Part Was True

by Deborah McKinlay

  I know what you mean about the effect of proximity to flavor, he wrote:

  It’s the same with fish. I used to go out to Nantucket at New Year’s, just before the final dive. Just before the water was too cold for the divers. I’d go there just to eat scallops. The last of them so rich tasting and yet clean at the same time.

  It was after midnight. He’d had a quiet dinner alone at a small Italian restaurant in the next town—eaten vongole, drunk a Fernet Branca with the owner, and then driven back at ten and felt like working. It was a good feeling so he’d gone with it. But then, he hadn’t worked. He’d turned on his computer and pulled up the screen and, after a moment, lifted a hand toward the familiar keyboard, but not in the fast, heavy, pecking style of a well-built, forty-nine-year-old, successful male author. Not in his usual style. More like a child picking up a crab. As if danger lurked there. He’d tapped out a few words, and stopped. Then he’d sat motionless for a moment fighting the blank. Then he’d shaken his fingers out intently and decided it was just late, he was tired, and then he’d reread Eve’s letter about the plums. It was his favorite so far, longer.

  It was strange how these missives from Eve, so recently added, were fast becoming part of the fabric of his life. When he read them, he felt like himself. Like his best self. He detected on her ivory-headed notepaper the fine, fresh scent of herbs.

  He wanted to solidify the friendship. Deepen it. So at 1:00 a.m., he wrote:

  I am better at cooking than I am at most anything else. At writing I can cross the finish line well enough, but not in any particular style. And with people I have a tendency to trip at the first hurdle. When I say people, I mean women. I am only just becoming aware of how consistently I fail them. Maybe, with the realization, I will redress some of my debt to your sex.

  He signed off, took the letter and his empty glass down to the kitchen, and went to bed.

  “Well, the good news is your heart is fine.” The doctor beamed at Eve when she said this. She had skin the color of caramel and a fine gold chain at her neck. She shimmered against the municipal blue and dun veneer of the hospital room.

  “Yes, thank you,” Eve said, doing her best to respond to the smile. What she thought was, At least if it were my heart, something could be done about it.

  “But you should see your own GP soon. Your own GP may want to run some more tests, to be able to discover what is the cause of your symptoms.”

  What is the cause? Eve thought, mentally repeating the slight misphrasing. What is the cause?

  “Yes,” she said.

  “We have only done an EKG here today,” the doctor went on. “So all we know is that there is no immediate danger of a heart attack. But you do not have any other symptoms of heart problems at this stage. The lungs are clear, too. Are you in any discomfort now?”

  Eve wanted to shout, Yes! Yes, I am in extreme discomfort. “No,” she said.

  The doctor looked at her, sympathetic. “Anxiety can sometimes produce these sorts of symptoms. That is something your own doctor might be able to help you with. There is a great deal that can be done,” she said.

  “Yes. Yes. Thank you.” Eve stood to leave, lifting her bag, suddenly terribly heavy, and bracing herself to face Izzy and Ollie, who were waiting outside. And the doctor, taking the signal from her, stood and walked with her to the door.

  “I’m fine. I just haven’t been sleeping,” Eve said in the corridor, where Ollie and Izzy stood now in front of their hard plastic chairs. Ollie’s had scraped and marked the floor when he got up. “And I was perhaps a bit dehydrated.”

  “Thank heavens,” Izzy said. Then, “We’ll hit terrible traffic on the way back now.”

  Jack wished he hadn’t said that stuff to Eve; it sounded pretentious in the daylight. But it was too late. Rick had seen the letter lying addressed on the table in the kitchen and mailed it. Rick was a demon for washing things and mailing things.

  Damn, Jack thought, once he realized there was no going back; he could foul things up with a woman without even meeting her. He felt irrationally depressed about the possibility of getting things wrong with Eve. There was something about her that made him want to please her. He hadn’t felt like that for a long time—for the past fifteen years women had been trying to please him. Not many had managed it.

  He decided to go to Hatty’s to cheer himself up, and he was ready to leave when he heard footsteps on the front porch. He froze, about to duck out the back, expecting Lisa, and then, shamed, decided to be a man about the thing and speak to her. He blew out hard and went to the door.

  “Sorry, are you writing? You’re writing, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Jack replied, taken aback.

  “I came to apologize,” Adrienne said.

  “Apologize?”

  “Yes. I felt so bad about my visit. Quizzing you about your writing. I know better, actually. I know you should never ask an artist about their work. It was intrusive.”

  Jack was too surprised by this development to respond. He waited a moment, while his focus firmed.

  “So,” she said evenly, “I just wanted to say that I was sorry.”

  Jack looked away briefly, toward a cast iron umbrella stand next to the door. It housed a small collection of quirky walking sticks and a Japanese paper parasol. He had never liked it.

  “I seem to recall,” he said, looking up again, “that I was the jackass.”

  She didn’t reply to this, just held his eye, smiling lightly. She was even more attractive than he’d remembered.

  “Are you out here with friends?” he asked, glancing past her, expecting to see a couple of young women, waiting, in that way young women wait, with their hips askew and their hair caught up in their dark glasses. There were none.

  “No, I drove out to see you.” She turned slightly and nodded toward a black Jeep parked at the curb.

  Jack didn’t know what to say next, so he suggested that she walk into town with him for coffee, and she agreed.

  Walking, they talked about Dex, their common interest.

  “I’m glad for him,” Adrienne said. “He’s so talented.” The callback had gone the way that Dex had hoped.

  “He had a brush with this sort of success about ten years ago, but it faded for some reason,” Jack told her, thinking about Dex in those days. He’d always been the same with him, with Jack. But around other people when those early, bigger parts had started to come, and with them the attention, he’d had a live edge. An energy that was palpable. Speaking to him this week on the phone, hearing his news and the sound of a bar, or a party, in the background, Jack had detected that energy again. He envied it.

  “He never stopped working,” he said. “He just kept at it.” He was only just beginning to realize how true this was.

  There was silence for a minute, the ground covered. They walked on, the sidewalk warm under their feet, and the sun on their heads, past half a dozen sprawling shingle houses and two red brick historic buildings on which flags fluttered, and a park. And along farther, under the awnings of the dainty colonial downtown stores, full of wooden boats, striped sweaters, and elaborate swimsuits.

  “I love the sea,” Adrienne offered eventually.

  “So do I. But I liked this bit of it more when it was less gussied up.”

  She laughed and Jack felt his ego kick in. The need to keep a woman’s attention—a beautiful woman’s attention. Old habits.

  “Everything’s kinda perfect out here these days,” he said. “It’s starting to feel unnatural.”

  The pair of them paused as an extremely tanned, spry elderly woman blocked their way. She was bending forward, a plastic bag protecting her hands and her rings. Near her a bichon frise waited, panting. Its tongue was the color of strawberry candy—the color of its owner’s lipstick.

  “No trash in the streets,” Adrienne said when they’d passed.

  “No, they keep it all indoors.”

  Hatty made coffee the way Jack liked it, without anything in it th
at Jack couldn’t identify. He liked to be able to order a coffee and know that it would come in a thick china cup and smell like coffee and look like coffee. When she saw him, she poured some from the Cona pot she kept in the kitchen for herself and handed it to him with a broad smile. “And what can I get the young lady?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’ll have coffee, too,” Adrienne said.

  Jack was pleased. He watched as she lifted her cup and sipped.

  “Were you one of those bookish kids, who always wanted to write, Jack?” she asked, and then immediately a slight shadow crossed her features—concern that she’d strayed again into uncomfortable territory.

  Jack felt embarrassed knowing he’d made her feel that way. He had no time for pretension, and although there were certain rituals he’d observed to protect his working life, he wasn’t a writer who thought of himself as an artist. If anything, his pretension lay in trying to pretend the opposite. He’d tried, maybe too hard, to give the impression that he was an ordinary workingman. A tradesman, or a high school teacher, like his father had been.

  “I wanted to be a journalist, actually,” he said. “I thought I was gonna break some news story about big business or government that would change the world.”

  “And did you?”

  “I mostly covered sports. And petty crime. And dog shows.”

  “So then you started writing fiction?”

  “After a fashion. The dog shows hadn’t quite knocked the high-mindedness out of me, so I quit the newspaper and sat and brooded, and chewed a Bic pen and churned out a pile of painful fake Joyce. And then, when that didn’t get me the attention of the international literary set, I started on some painful fake Hemingway.”

  She laughed.

  “My poor wife had to pay the bills and put up with all my clichés and conceit into the bargain. Eventually she got wise and left me for a pediatrician, a real wholesome guy. They live in Connecticut. Happy as clams. Three kids and a gazebo. So at least I don’t have to feel too bad about that.”

  “Marnie was your second wife then?”

  Jack, lifting his coffee, paused.

  “Dex told me about her,” Adrienne explained.

  “Marnie was my second wife—two strikes. Apparently I’m not good husband material.”

  “No children?”

  “No. It’s probably a good thing. I reckon I’d be pretty lousy father material as well, and that’s a tougher rap.”

  As soon as he said it, he regretted it. It was too serious a tone for a conversation over coffee with a young woman who was a virtual stranger. He braced himself for some cutesy reply, the kind a lot of women would come out with, “Oh, I don’t know…” A flirtatious sort of reply. But he didn’t get one.

  “Yes,” she said seriously. “Yes, it is.”

  Back at the house, he said good-bye to Adrienne outside. They stood, a little stiffly, beside her car for a moment. Then, just before she stepped out and around the hood to get in the driver’s side, she stretched up to kiss his cheek, lightly, simply. “See you, Jack.” She called over her shoulder. “I’m glad I came.”

  “Me, too,” he said.

  Chapter Four

  Jack was still at the curb when Lisa drove past with her car roof down and turned into her own driveway with a reckless swerve. It was hard for Jack not to come to the conclusion that this, and the nonchalant way she got out of her car and then swung the door with a flourish, was not done with him in mind. It was. Anyway, filled suddenly with purpose, and a sense of decency after Adrienne’s visit, he crossed the road and her front lawn and called out to her.

  “Lisa.”

  She turned immediately, her heels belying the casual expression that she had adopted.

  “Jack?” She had a shopping bag in her hands from a boutique in town. Jack recognized the name of it—he had bought presents there a few times for Marnie, her face always brightening at the sight of the bag. Now Lisa lifted it in front of her, like a shield.

  “Lisa, I wanted to apologize. I should never have spoken to you the way I did,” Jack said, reaching her on the driveway.

  “No, you shouldn’t have,” she said.

  She tipped her head to frown up at him, looking, he thought, as if she might want to draw the thing out, extract a longer, increasingly thin apology. He prepared himself for it. But Lisa, acutely aware that Jackson Cooper was an attractive, solvent, single male, one, what’s more, whom she genuinely liked—a rare breed for which her sights were permanently set—smiled and let the shopping bag slip, and stood her chest back to attention and said, “We drank too much,” in an accepting voice.

  She was prettier at that moment, realer, Jack thought, than she ever had been before.

  “I appreciate it, Lisa,” he replied. Let’s-be-friends hovered just beneath the words.

  Hearing it, angry at herself for ignoring it, Lisa said, “Would you like to come in? It’s getting so warm, I’m going to spend the afternoon by the pool.” One last lure, softly placed.

  Jack’s house did not have a pool. The previous owners, a geriatric couple who had employed His and Hers Swedish nurses by the time they’d sold it, had not approved of pool bathing. They’d attributed their great age, ninety-six for him and ninety-three for her, to swimming in the sea, tottering down for a morning dip each day from March till October, every year since they’d bought the house in 1956. Jack thought of them now, imagined their wizened little bodies in their black swimsuits, her with a rubber cap on her head, both of them clutching towels around their waists, picking their way across the sand. Hell, he thought, he didn’t want to be old yet.

  “Okay, sure,” he heard his brain say. But his voice didn’t let him down. “Thanks. No,” he said as kindly as he could.

  Lisa, who recognized the defeat in men’s kindness, lowered her shopping and her breasts and her hopes again and resigned herself to another long evening of empty telephone calls and aimless magazine reading.

  Dear Eve,

  I feel that I may have crossed some sort of boundary in our friendship. I haven’t heard from you since I mentioned my personal life and wonder whether you are more comfortable keeping our conversations (which is how I think of our correspondence) to the topic that introduced us—food. On the other hand, this may be pure narcissism (I’m prone to it) and your lack of response may have nothing whatsoever to do with me.

  So, having weighed up the two options, I am going to take a risk—would you like to meet? My suggestion is a neutral spot—Paris. We could meet for a few days and eat. Perhaps in October, after the crowds are gone—after the Americans are gone. Don’t worry about details, tickets, and the like. If you trust me, I can organize those. (You will of course choose your own accommodation.) We could meet somewhere wonderfully lit and fabulously fragrant. I will be the man in the Panama hat.

  Jack

  Eve parked the car in the parking building attached to the new shopping mall. The shopping mall was about eight years old now, but it was still referred to as “new” by most people in Sudbury, and probably would be until there was another new one. She would have preferred to travel by bus, not because she liked traveling by bus—she did not; Eve disliked all public transport—but because she felt it somehow gauche to work at a charity shop while driving a Bentley.

  The Bentley had been bought by her mother some years previously and Eve had inherited it and kept it, selling her own cheery little Mitsubishi on Izzy’s insistence. Izzy was not ready to part with anything that her grandmother had touched.

  Eve had to take two turns around the car park before she found a parking space she was comfortable maneuvering into and then she walked over the bridge and down the High Street to the Red Cross shop.

  “Hello, stranger,” Geraldine said. It was true that, over the past twelve months, Eve’s attendance there had been infrequent. She felt bad about it.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been more help, Geraldine,” she said.

  “Not a problem,” Geraldine insisted cheerily. She
was wearing an extraordinary multicolored collection of garments, several of which she had apparently made herself, and her hair hung in a long, careless plait down her back. She smiled broadly. She was the happiest person Eve had ever met.

  “You’re here now,” she said. “Shall I make some tea? I’ve just been sorting these.” She indicated a small hillock of baby clothes on the floor beside her. “Into sizes and whatnot. A woman came in with them this morning. They’re all in marvelous condition. Look.” She tugged a baby’s crawler suit from the pile and held it up.

  Eve agreed that it looked immaculate. “I’ll make the tea,” she said. “You’ve got your hands full. I’ve brought some ginger biscuits.”

  “Goody.”

  Eve found the genuine enthusiasm in Geraldine’s voice deeply heartwarming. She’d been right to come.

  “Even the tea tastes better when you make it,” Geraldine said when Eve emerged from the musty back room with the cups.

  “I brought some loose with me. I used it instead of the bags,” Eve said.

  “It’s not just that. It’s a touch. I’ve never had it—that touch with food. If it doesn’t need scissors or a can opener, I can’t cook it.” She laughed.

  Eve laughed, too, and put her cup down to help with the baby clothes. They’d finished by the time a young woman came in with a little girl of about two. The child was in a stroller. She looked at Eve, wide-eyed, over her sipping cup.