That Part Was True

by Deborah McKinlay

“I am a better parent to my sons than I am to you.”

  “You are a parent to your sons,” Izzy stressed.

  Simon winced at the amendment, but accepted it. Music from the small orchestra in the room where they’d had their drinks drifted in to them. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Izzy, I think that you and your mother have reason to detest me. I understand that. But I hope, too, that this meeting, and my help with your wedding perhaps, will put some of it right. I am not young anymore and life has taught me a few lessons, and I would like to make it up to you as best I can.”

  Izzy was fighting tears at this point, and to mask this lack of composure, she at last lifted her knife and fork. Her father followed suit and, still eyeing her, took a bite of his fish. Izzy, slowly, forked a mouthful of veal between her pale lips.

  “Up to your mother’s standards, I trust?” He smiled gently. “She was always such a marvelous cook.”

  “She still is,” Izzy said, and a small softening was established between them.

  A short while later, after some light chat about Izzy’s job and Ollie’s job and Ollie’s family, Izzy asked, “Who will you bring to the wedding with you? I assume you will come to my wedding?” Her smile was nervous.

  “It’s up to you, Izzy. Although I suggest that if you’d like to meet your st…” He held back from saying stepmother. “…Laura, and the boys, it would be best to do so before your wedding. Weddings can be overwhelming occasions. I should know,” he added.

  Surprisingly, they both laughed.

  After her father had put her in a taxi, diplomatically avoiding a too-familiar kiss or too-formal handshake by tenderly taking her upper arm in farewell, Izzy took her telephone out of her bag and rang her assistant to say, unusually, that she would not be coming back to the office. She felt more shaken, more unsure of herself, at that moment than she had ever felt in her life.

  Chapter Five

  “I don’t like it,” Jack said quietly to Dex. They were sitting at a bar next to a swimming pool in Los Angeles.

  “Don’t like what?” Dex asked while watching, with no fervent purpose, the lime triangle punctuating the lengthy back view of a passing blonde.

  “Feeling aimless,” Jack said.

  “Works for me,” Dex said, turning to him.

  Jack laughed. “You’re not aimless. You’re ‘Up and Coming.’ Maître d’s know your name.”

  “I’m too old for ‘Up and Coming’,” Dex said. “I’m an ‘Overnight Success.’”

  They both laughed. Dex was in California for meetings and other things that Jack didn’t really follow, to do with his new movie. He was busy but living in a good hotel, and Jack, on a whim, had flown out to join him for a weekend. It had turned into a week. A week during which he hadn’t written a word, although he’d intended to.

  Brooke, Dex’s daughter, suddenly, sparklingly teenaged, had joined them for a couple of days, and then, in the wake of that convivial visit, Jack had determined to work. But he’d missed Brooke. Not so much Brooke herself, whom he barely knew, but her energy, the playful affinity between her and Dex. He’d been enthralled by it, had wanted to be part of it, and had wanted Brooke to like him. Maybe we’re hardwired, he’d thought after she’d left, to want the young to like us, to want to be near them. Maybe our pleasure in their infectious greenness drives us to protect them—evolutionary yin and yang.

  In Brooke’s absence, Dex was around less again and Jack told himself he’d write. But although it wasn’t his style to ball up pages and toss them dramatically into a wastebasket, he’d felt like it once or twice over the past couple of days. Looking over the pool from the suite attached to Dex’s, he’d felt like it. The comparison was so hard to avoid. There was Dex, out advancing his career, and there was he—staring at a blank screen, like a sap. It made him feel inadequate—a new feeling. One of too many lately.

  “I’ve decided to take a break from writing after I finish this one,” he said, although he hadn’t really decided it until right then. He didn’t know what had changed. But something had. Undeniably it had. The novel, this new one, wasn’t making any headway. Hadn’t been making any headway even before he’d come to L.A. It was one of the reasons he’d come, and then stayed. To escape the concrete acceptance of the nonwriting. Even when he was writing, it was, for the first time, against the tide, rather than with the push at his back. Which came first, he wondered, the failure or the feeling of it?

  “I think this series has run its course,” he said.

  Dex cupped his hands to his lips and spoke in a movie trailer voice, “Six best-selling titles, three major motion pictures.”

  “This one’s not coming so easy. And anyway I don’t want to just go on churning it out. I don’t want to produce a load of derivative crap just because it’s popular.”

  Dex twisted his legs to face Jack. He removed his dark glasses and polished them slowly on his shirt, thinking. Then he clipped Jack, not hard, but resoundingly, upside the head.

  “Listen to me, Coop, you prick. I am the self-indulgent one in this pairing. I am an actor, we’re meant to be self-indulgent. You, on the other hand, are a straight-up decent guy. You are also extremely talented. The stuff you’ve written is popular because it’s good, because it tells a good story and people want a good story. You entertain people, Jack, and that is not crap. It is important. It takes skill. It’s a skill you’ve got, and if you don’t wanna use it anymore, if you’d rather sit on your ass for the next twenty years, or look for some anemic hobby to fill your old age with, go ahead. You can afford never to work again, so that’s the sort of luxury you can avail yourself of, but don’t go whining about it. Not to me anyway.”

  “Whining?”

  “You were whining.”

  The music at the bar was loud, and the California sunshine was making the skin of all the slick people glisten. Dex was looking younger by the day. He was looking, Jack had thought ever since he arrived, vibrant—vibrant and purposeful.

  “If you really want something to take your mind off your nonexistent troubles, that li’l Hailey over there’s got a yen for ya,” he said, nodding his head toward a pretty brunette, dancing in a pair of very short shorts on the other side of the pool. Hailey lifted her hair with one hand, raising a slim bare arm, and tossed it back over her shoulder. Then she looked toward Jack and smiled—a poppy, opening to the sun.

  Jack smiled back, but it was a smile with no promise in it. “Gals like Hailey are part of the trouble, Dex. I just ain’t equipped for them anymore.”

  “They got pills for that, pardner.”

  Jack laughed. The trip to the West Coast had been good in one respect: It had reminded him that, while he was wary still of being old, he didn’t actually want to be younger. Younger was nice to look at, nice to be around, but it was just as complicated to live. He wanted, he’d realized, what he felt fifty oughtta have—children maybe, a Brooke of his own. And a wife. Not like Marnie, a real marriage. The way his parents had had a marriage. He wanted that. He wanted what he could have had with Paula all those years ago if only he’d been seasoned enough and smart enough to see it. A relationship with a woman he could talk to. He wanted a friend. And he wanted some sureness. Weren’t you supposed to be sure of yourself by the time you were middle-aged? Wasn’t that the compensation you got for your sagging butt and dependence on reading glasses?

  Dex, looking at him as if he knew what he was thinking, said, “I’m gonna say this again, because you still seem to be determined to avoid the possibility of an available solution: What about Adrienne?”

  “It may surprise you to hear that I have been thinking exactly that myself. What about Adrienne?” Jack said.

  Gwen had made a play of standing over Eve while she made the doctor’s appointment, handing her the little red leather index book she kept on her desk with telephone numbers in it, pointedly opened at “D.” But Eve would have made the appointment anyway. She had had enough. The talk with Gwen had let in the possibility of getting help,
levered back the sides of the narrow crack in the wall of hopelessness that she’d never managed to crawl through on her own. She wanted to get help. She wanted to go to her daughter’s wedding and behave like the mother of the bride, for Izzy’s sake as much as for her own. She had never done enough for Izzy, simply stood back and let her mother and the nannies take over. She owed her. She was suddenly acutely conscious of that. She owed Izzy a mother.

  The young locum in the surgery smiled warmly at Eve when she walked in. He was not much older than Izzy and his shirt was escaping from his trousers. “What can I do for you?” he asked, as if he already knew.

  “I had a panic attack,” Eve said firmly.

  “Uh-huh. I see there are some test results on your file from…last year and then there was a hospital visit a few weeks ago. Is that right?”

  “Yes. There’s nothing actually wrong with me,” Eve said.

  The doctor looked at her.

  “It’s just anxiety. I get terribly anxious. But it feels…” She trailed off.

  He looked at her for a moment then twisted back to the computer on his desk. “Certainly the results of the tests we’ve had from your last episode here, and then this more recent one, don’t suggest any obvious physical cause. No heart irregularities and the lungs are clear. You have no history of asthma? Or family history?”

  “No, none.”

  “No dry cough, or more general episodes of breathlessness?”

  “No.”

  “Well, anxiety, or stress, could be at the root of your symptoms. I can refer you to someone who you could talk to about that. Therapy is often very helpful in these cases. In the meantime, a short course of medication can also be extremely effective.”

  “Yes,” Eve said, though part of her still wanted to deny all this, to retreat into the coping Englishness she was infused with. And although she would have argued, if such a topic had ever come up in her hearing, that emotional and mental illnesses warranted the same sort of treatment as physical ones, she still wished she were seeking treatment for a broken arm. “Yes.” She sighed. “Yes, anything that might help would be very welcome.”

  “Well, it’s not going to get better overnight. You know that.”

  “Yes, Gwen. I do.”

  “But you’ve made a terrific start,” Gwen beamed.

  “I hope so,” Eve replied.

  Dear Eve,

  I have not heard from you for a couple of weeks. No, that’s not true. I haven’t heard from you for seventeen days. I spent eight of those seventeen days in California—in Los Angeles, to be precise, with a friend. He is an old friend, but he is younger than me in pretty much every respect and he is on the verge, I think, of huge success. I’m a little envious.

  I brought oranges back with me and I intend to turn them into marmalade. That seems a fitting memento, something golden and shiny with an underlying hint of bitterness. Trouble is I don’t know how. I would bet the whole orange farm that you do. Maybe you’ll tell me.

  Jack

  P.S. Forget that foolishness about meeting in Paris. I have always just assumed that you were over forty, like me, and single, like me.

  Dear Jack,

  Any good cookbook will carry a recipe for marmalade. There is not much difference between them, although as in most things, and cooking in particular, you need to feel your way at first, and then add your own stamp. I prefer to slice rather than chop the fruit, and from time to time I replace the white sugar with muscovado. I think you might like that. It’s a stronger taste, more masculine somehow.

  Eve

  P.S. I am over forty and single as you suppose. I don’t think that anyone who had met me would ever assume otherwise and I am not surprised, even with our lack of acquaintance, that you should assume it, too. I think it is something I exude. Lately, though, I have striven to reverse this, just a little bit, and subsequently, a small part of me, a part hitherto unacknowledged, has considered the idea of travelling to Paris to eat. In the company of a friend, if a very new one.

  Dear Eve,

  This marmalade business is not for wusses (the class in which I count myself). I have acquired a copy of “Recipes for Afternoon Teas” (Hodder, London, 1965), from a small secondhand bookstore near my home. The bookstore and one coffee shop, of which I am also a faithful customer, are among the few things left hereabouts that still have a little sand in ’em. I live near the sea, but the town is all shined up now and nothing ever rusts. The bookstore is good, though, and is run by a suitably old fella. I would like to tell you that he blew dust from the cover of the “Afternoon Teas,” but he didn’t. Didn’t even need one of those rickety stepladders to get it down. It was right there by the cash register, but it seems like a good one. 1965 was the year of “The Man with the Golden Gun,” and I probably owe my career to that book, so I have faith. Anyway, I am now on the trail of 8-ounce jars. The fruit weighs just over 5 pounds, so I figure to yield about fifteen. Do you say “pounds,” or are you all metric’d up in your neck of the marmalade woods?

  Jack

  The country has moved to metric, but I still say ‘pounds’. I am, as I said, over forty—forty-six, in fact. One year beyond that crucial mid-point, the downhill. The One year that makes all the difference. The way the 2% genetic variation does between people and apes.

  Get a few different sized jars. You’ll need some small ones for the dregs. And don’t consider microwave sterilizing—it isn’t thorough enough.

  What can you tell me about tuna?

  Eve

  Fresh bread. Vidalia Onions. Beer.

  Jack

  I’m not sure that my daughter will want beer for her engagement party dinner. She’s very chic and quite persnickety.

  Lime. Wasabi. Rosé.

  A daughter. A wedding. Your life has a roundness that mine lacks. I envy you.

  Also, “persnickety” is hands down the best word I’ve come across in a very long time.

  Eve found the notion that Jackson Cooper would envy her ridiculous.

  Izzy had been in touch with her father regularly since their lunch date. He had telephoned her the day afterward, and it had gone from there. But she had not mentioned this to her mother. She was not sure what had stopped her. In fact, she had only barely discussed it with Ollie. She had felt, strangely, guilty, but happy, too. It was perplexing. On the one hand, the bond with her father was growing; on the other, with that rush of fresh feeling, she was also aware of a new rawness with regard to her childhood. A grieving for what she hadn’t had. Izzy was a young woman who had never really been a child; never thought of herself as a child. Her grandmother, who had been by far the strongest force in her youth, had always treated her like an adult. She had always wanted to be one. But lately there had been times when she’d wanted to be a little girl, wanted to be held in someone’s arms and comforted like a little girl.

  In fact, everything had shifted suddenly. Here was her father acting like her father, and here was her mother acting like…Izzy couldn’t put her finger on what it was that Eve was acting like, but she certainly was not acting like Eve.

  “I don’t know what the problem is,” Ollie said. They were eating tapas in a noisy bar near Izzy’s office.

  “She’s changed.”

  “Changed good? Or changed bad?”

  “Just changed.”

  “Be specific.”

  “Last night, when I telephoned her about the weekend, there was music playing in the background.”

  “Well, that’s bloody suspicious.”

  “Don’t be facetious, Ollie. You know what I mean.” She lifted a small circle of spicy sausage from her plate and then rejected it in favor of a sliver of squid. “It was jazz,” she said. She popped the squid into her mouth and made a face.

  Responding to the softer expression, in fact a general softening that he’d noted in Izzy of late, Ollie smiled. Then he said, “Maybe she’s just happy.”

  Izzy made another face.

  “I saw Daddy, Mummy.”
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br />   “Daddy?” Eve repeated. The word so unwanted that she failed for a moment to catch Izzy’s meaning.

  “My father,” Izzy explained softly.

  “Did you?” Eve said. The tight feeling started in her upper chest, but she concentrated the way that the therapist, whom she’d seen twice now, had suggested she should, on the ticking of the large kitchen clock. It had once been a station clock and the tick resounded. Eve concentrated hard on that tick. She knew that she must not give in to the catch in her breath. Tick. Tock. In. Out.

  “We had lunch,” Izzy said in partial admission. “It was, I don’t know…illuminating. In some ways at least. In others quite upsetting.”

  “Yes,” Eve said, trying not to feel upset herself. “Well, I suppose it’s natural that you might want to see him. Marriage is a big change in a life and…Yes, I can see that.” She was trying. Trying to understand her daughter’s viewpoint.

  “It must have been hard for you. When he left.”

  Eve sighed and closed her eyes for a moment. “Yes. Yes, it was. Very hard. For you, too.”

  Izzy looked surprised.

  “He was never…” Eve wanted to choose her words, wanted to tread carefully in this new, delicate domain. She went forward as if onto crystal. “He was never one of those fathers who did things for babies—one of those modern fathers who changes nappies and things. I think he gave you a bath once.”

  They both, in the middle of the tension, smiled lightly at this. A bubble ascending.

  “But when he came home, you would always run to him. You would run to him with your fat little arms stretched up to be lifted. ‘Daddy’ was your first word.”

  Izzy was aware again of the unreliability of so many things she thought she had known. Here was another frayed edge.

  “I never had fat arms,” she said.