He took a sip of his whiskey and gazed at a framed print of a nondescript wild bird on the opposite wall. It wasn’t beautiful, but it belonged. Maybe he and Adrienne could belong, if he shifted a little. Maybe she could even be a muse of sorts. In many ways she had only said things about his writing that he’d already said to himself. He needed to write better or not write at all.
He tossed the drink back and got up to undress. He hoped Dex wasn’t gonna try to sneak those two little chickadees in past the old girl downstairs. If he did, they were not going to get such friendly service in the morning. Hell, he thought, maybe I’m not cut out for a road trip with a movie star. He knew with absolute conviction at that moment that that was where Dex was heading. For stardom.
“You look…”
“Younger,” Eve said, and smiled.
Beth laughed. “Yes, that’s it. You do. You look younger.”
Eve was aware that the hands of the wall clock at her back were moving. It was a thought that had soothed her when she first came to sessions with Beth, the advance of time. Now she knew that they were ticking away her last fifty minutes of therapy. She was throwing off the bowlines.
“How are you feeling about things now?” Beth asked.
“I feel…I feel as though I’m not cured.”
Beth nodded, watching her, prompting her with her own silence to continue.
“I think what I mean is that I realize now that I can’t be cured exactly, although that is what I was hoping for when I first came. I wanted to be fixed.”
“Yes,” Beth said.
“Like a leaking pipe, or a flat tire.”
Beth smiled and a small need to remain in the safe harbor of that smile quivered in Eve, but did not overwhelm her. “It has been quite a revelation for me to understand that ‘fixing’ isn’t the point.”
“No.”
“I suppose it had just never occurred to me that I had the resources to come to grips with some of my problems myself. It’s probably a bit ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous?”
“I just mean that if I had the ability to sort out these things…these emotional barriers that have held me back so much in my life, all that time…”
“Perhaps you didn’t have the skills then,” Beth said. “Perhaps you needed some help. And guidance.”
“Yes,” Eve answered. She smiled. “You’ve given me that.”
“I think it’s been a joint effort,” Beth said. “But I also think that timing plays a great part. Sometimes circumstances just converge in a way that pushes a door open.”
“That might be true. But it took me a year to even consider living differently from the way that I had when my mother was alive. She died and I just went on, as if she were still there. Telling me what to do.” Eve frowned. The topic still pricked.
“In my experience, Eve, logic is an extremely weak opponent for upbringing. You had a lot to overcome and you needed some tools. You’ll go on needing those tools. But they’ll be there when you reach for them.”
“Yes.” Eve smiled. She was filled with gratitude toward Beth, who she understood was just doing her job, but who, nevertheless, had always been so empathetic. Their time was almost up. “I’m going to Paris,” she said. “To meet my friend Jack.”
Eve had told Beth very little about Jack. She probably thinks he’s some meek pen pal, she thought. She didn’t care. She had only ever mentioned him as a way of presenting herself as a less bereft figure.
“Paris.” Beth smiled. “How wonderful.”
At this response Eve realized that she had said this out loud to make it true. To believe in it herself. She wanted to believe that she could do it.
Chapter Nine
“I hear you’re a wonderful cook, Eve.”
Eve was spared from answering because one of the children lifted his fork like a sword and shouted, “En garde,” to his brother, who responded eagerly.
“Boys!” Simon said. And with that single reprimand they put their forks down and went back to sitting as they had since their arrival, genially and obediently at the end of the table.
“They’ve been cooped up in the car,” Laura said apologetically.
“I noticed there was a park,” Eve offered, glad of practical terrain. “Just in the next street, I saw it when we were coming in.”
“Oh, good.” Laura smiled, cementing this thin connection. “They can run off some steam before the drive back.”
She was a lovely woman, Eve thought. A lovely woman living the lovely life that could have been hers. Although she thought that way only briefly, Eve was a person who, if given to introspection, possibly depression, and certainly apprehension, had no tendency to bitterness.
“I think it was very brave of you to do this, Eve. Izzy is lucky to have such a selfless mother.” They both looked at Izzy, seated between her young half brothers and her father. On the other side of the boys, on Eve’s left, Ollie was telling jokes to them now. They were laughing.
“I’m not sure about that,” Eve said. It was hard not to warm to Laura. “The situation must be a bit uncomfortable for you, too.”
“It was always Fiona who was the problem for me.”
There was a brief silence at Laura’s mention of Fiona, the woman Simon had left Eve for. Afterward, Virginia had admonished that Eve must simply get on, have as little as possible to do with Simon, and never, under any circumstances, entertain any contact with That Woman.
“She made our early years so difficult,” Laura said. “But then there was Tim, her son, and he is such a nice young man. I expect you’ll meet him before the wedding.”
“Yes,” Eve replied. “I think that’s been planned.” She couldn’t imagine it. But they smiled at each other. They were just two women after all, Eve thought. The fact that they had been married to the same man need not be a barrier to friendship. And looking at the table, she saw a family, an untidy sort of family, granted, but a family nonetheless.
“And now there’s Izzy,” Laura said. “You must be very proud of her.”
“Yes,” Eve answered, filled suddenly with this truth, the swell of it. “I am.”
Laura sighed. Across from her, the boys were still laughing. Ollie had turned a butter knife into a mustache, and Izzy was remonstrating with him in the exact tone their father had used on them a moment earlier.
“That’s what it comes down to in the end, isn’t it?” she said. “The children. You just have to try to do what’s best for your children.”
“Yes.” Eve met her gaze. She had large brown eyes, warm and friendly, radiating as much meanness as a doe’s. “Although I was not so wise about that when Izzy was your boys’ age. I wish I had been.”
Laura pulled her mouth into a small grimace. “I wasn’t for a long time either,” she said. “Even a year or two ago I was still wasting energy on being jealous of Fiona. She used to call at all hours of the night, wanting things from Simon—money mostly. But it was his attention she really needed. I’m not saying I don’t still find her trying, I do, but I really care for Tim and, well, I was ill.”
Eve nodded; she knew.
“It turns out that all the clichés are true,” Laura continued quietly. “You really do get a sense of what you value most after that kind of experience—at least I did. And it seems as though Simon has come to the same conclusions. We usually do.” She faced him, unable to keep the shine of love out of her expression, but then she seemed to catch herself, aware of whom she was speaking to.
Eve reached out to her. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve had something of a reminder of that sort myself lately.”
Their food came at last, and the boys were thrilled by the appearance of a large bowl of thin-cut French fries.
“I hope we…” But Eve didn’t need to finish because Laura did.
“We’ll make it work,” she said. She leaned over and pinched one of the boys’ French fries between two stretched fingers, pulled a face in response to their mock outrage, and turned back to Ev
e. “We’re the grown-ups. It’s our job.”
On the way home from the restaurant, which was halfway between London and Eve’s house in Dorset, Izzy said, “My monkfish was superb.”
“It was all very nice,” Eve said. “Well done. The whole thing was really very nice.”
“I thought the service was a bit slow,” Izzy said.
“It was,” Eve agreed, placating Izzy, who seemed as full of nerves as she had been before lunch. Eve had thought, since the occasion had gone without any hitches, that Izzy would have relaxed a little, but she had not. She’d been edgy since they got into the car, leaning over the back of the passenger seat to chat emptily to Eve about trifles.
Ollie said, “They’re good kids, aren’t they? Those boys, Ed and Felix. They did pretty well, I thought, sitting through that meal. It took long enough.”
Izzy, for the first time, was silent.
“Izzy was always extremely well behaved at the table, too,” Eve said, wanting to do something for her daughter, but then worrying, almost as she said the words, whether they hadn’t put Izzy and Simon’s sons too much in the same grouping—siblings being compared. But Izzy, still apparently lost in her own thoughts, didn’t respond.
Ollie, detecting the lull in the conversation, switched on the car radio. They listened to it in silence for the next thirty miles.
It was a quiet evening. Eve made omelettes, and they ate them watching an undemanding film that Ollie had chosen. She and Izzy went on chatting lightly even once it had started. Izzy had been for a fitting of her dress.
“It has to be taken in a bit,” she said.
“I thought you had lost some weight,” Eve answered, trying not to make the statement sound like a criticism.
“All brides do,” Izzy replied matter-of-factly.
They watched the end of the film, and when Eve went up, Ollie and Izzy were stretched on the sofa, looking at magazines and half listening to the news, so Eve was not sure she wasn’t dreaming when she was woken a couple of hours later by raised voices. They were coming from downstairs and her first reaction was to get up. She assumed something startling had happened, but then she realized that the voices were arguing. Shouting.
Eve paused, having swung her legs from the bed, and held still, her bare feet on the floor, sleep shivered off, worried that they might be aware somehow of having woken her. She did not want them to feel spied on. Slowly, an interloper in her own bedroom, she eased her way back into bed and folded her head into the pillow. She didn’t want to hear. But she still could; physical barriers, bedding and carpet and plaster, were ill-matched to the emotional turbulence below.
“Oh, that’s so typical of you, Ollie,” Eve heard Izzy shriek. “You’re such a bloody child!”
“That’s right, Izzy. Tell me I’m a child. That’s your best defense, isn’t it? I’m a big kid. Not very original, is it?” Ollie’s words, though less shrill, were propelled enough by anger to carry as audibly as Izzy’s.
Now her voice came rising back, at first merely ill-humored, “It’s true, though.” Then, building to a roar. “It’s true.”
She sounded wildly out of control. Eve was so concerned that she sat up again, feeling that she ought to intervene, then realizing that she should not. Could not. For once, distance was warranted. She had to let them find their own way. It was their business. She wished that she were not aware of it at all.
There was a slam then and the shouting subsided, but Eve’s heart was still beating hard. Go away, she thought, go away. Everything is going to be all right.
The next morning the house was very quiet, and showering and dressing, Eve thought about the disturbance of the evening before. It was probably to be expected, she rationalized, like Izzy’s weight loss. Probably all just typical prewedding nerves. And, she thought, even aside from the practical aspects of the wedding, so much of which Izzy had taken upon herself, like all modern brides, Izzy and Ollie had the extra family complexities to deal with—Simon’s and his wives’ and children’s integration into the scene. And Ollie’s mother’s lack of involvement—she still had not confirmed that she would even be at the wedding, though Ollie’s sister, Cassie, had insisted that she would be. “You know Mummy,” she’d apparently said to Ollie. “She just likes to make an entrance.”
Eve wished she could lighten their load somehow. But she couldn’t think of anything that would help much. She decided she’d make porridge for breakfast. It was getting cold these mornings. Izzy loved porridge.
Dear Jack,
People often express concern for the solitary among us. I’ve known that concern in my life, been on the uncomfortable, poking end of it. But there is great luxury in solitude sometimes, especially if it is buttressed by material comfort, as mine has been. Lately, I’ve hopped out of my gilded, self-assembled cage more often, but I’m not sure I’m completely equipped yet for free flight. Unlike you. You’ve lived in the world and then used that living as fuel for your work. I’m rather in awe of both of those things.
Autumn is upon us here, the garden is looking naked with the cutting back, and we’ve had a lot of wind so the trees are prematurely bare. Perhaps the outside world can wait a bit longer for me. I’m making porridge this morning, to stave it off. I am traditionally puritanical with regard to the mixing (water, salt, and a brisk, clockwise spurtle) but I don’t object to the later addition of sugar.
Eve
“Ever eat real porridge, Dex? Made with salt and water?”
“Nope.”
“Me either.”
They were eating French toast in a roadside diner. The waitress, freshening their coffee, grinned at Dex. He was getting that fame aura again. It hung around him. Women had always been keen on him, but they were gluey now.
“What is porridge?” he asked, sliding his cup over, acknowledging the refill. “Thanks, sweetie.”
The girl, nineteen probably, comfortable with the one foot she had in womanhood, smiled broadly again and left.
“If I called a woman I didn’t know ‘sweetie’ with that look on my face, I’d lose an eye,” Jack said.
Dex shrugged.
“Porridge is oatmeal. The British call what we call oatmeal ‘porridge.’ In Scotland they make it with water and add salt.”
“Why didn’t ya say ‘oatmeal’ then? And why d’you wanna know if I eat it?”
“I was just thinking about something.”
Dex put his coffee down. “Bullshit.”
“Same to you,” Jack said.
“Porridge. And that orange jelly stuff…the marmalade.”
Jack didn’t respond.
“What’s all this British thing lately?”
“I don’t think an inquiry about porridge and a batch of marmalade constitutes a ‘British Thing.’”
But Dex, warming, performing a little, said, “Yeah, yeah it does. And there was that other business, too, that Ye Olde Christmas Puddin’ deal.”
Jack had ordered a Christmas pudding from a catalog recommended by Eve. She’d said they were as good as she could make, and in any case, it was too late to soak the fruit. He’d shown the catalog to Dex. “This is what I’m gonna stick to your ribs this year,” he’d said. They’d spent a lot of Christmases together.
“What’s wrong with pie?” Dex had answered.
“Okay, what gives? Who’s the broad?” he asked now. He quit toying with a half a dozen packets of sugar substitute and tossed them onto the table, fanned like a winning hand. He looked over them at Jack.
“Dexter, there are things that I do, not many things, granted, but some things, that are unrelated to broads. Cooking is one of them.”
“Cooking is one thing. A sudden interest in all things British is another. There’s a broad involved.”
“She’s not a broad.”
“Ah-haah.”
“She’s a friend.”
“A British friend.”
“A cook. She’s a cooking friend.”
“And where’d you meet
this British cooking friend?”
Jack paused briefly and then said, “I haven’t met her.”
“You haven’t met her?”
“No. We…correspond. It’s very genteel. We correspond about food.”
“Shit, Jack. Don’t tell me you’re on one of the dating sites. They’re for losers.”
“I am not on a dating site, and Eve is not a loser, and neither am I.”
“You’re messaging some broad you’ve never met about fuckin’ porridge.”
“Not ‘messaging,’ the occasional e-mail, but mostly letters. Very elegant.”
“Very sad. Do you even know what she looks like?”
“I do not. I don’t care what she looks like. We’re just friends, we talk about food. It’s…”
“Sad.”
“It’s pleasant. It’s deeply pleasant.”
“Do you speak on the phone, anything twenty-first century like that?”
“No. I considered it once, but she’s unlisted. And anyway I changed my mind later. I like the letters.”
“Aw hell, next thing she’s gonna want you to meet and you’ll have to stand under Big Ben for two hours with a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets in your hand and a red rose in your lapel.”
Jack reached and tugged his wallet from his back pocket and left a couple of bills on the table.
“Is Adrienne in on this foodie friend crap?” Dex asked.
Moving the saltshaker to secure the cash, Jack said, “Food and Adrienne are kind of mutually exclusive. Anyway, you’re wrong about Big Ben. It’s the Eiffel Tower.”
“My God,” Dex said, “I got to you just in time.”
Ollie did not want any porridge. He came downstairs before Izzy and said no to Eve’s offer. He just wanted coffee. She was glad to see him help himself. Not because it saved her the job, but because it spoke to his comfort in her house. She wanted him to be comfortable in her house.
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