Three-Martini Lunch

by Suzanne Rindell

  I was glad I did, too, because shortly after I ruled out telling Ms. Singer about my name, she said something that reminded me—for a fleeting moment—of Miss Everett.

  “One thing, Eden . . .” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s none of my business, but if you really want to make it as an editor, I would advise against marriage or a family.”

  I blinked, surprised by the abrupt unsolicited opinion.

  “You are quite young and perhaps the world will change someday, but as it stands, it’s near impossible for us women to have our cake and eat it, too. I’m nicer about it than others, but even I’ve had a tough time keeping a girl on after she’s decided to become pregnant. Some girls can marshal their mothers or an elderly aunt to babysit during the days, but the prevailing expectation is that she’d rather be at home and if she wouldn’t there’s something wrong with her that ought to be fixed. It is likely that at some point you will have to choose between a career or a family, and it’s good to know in advance which one you want most.”

  She did not say more, she said most, implying that it wasn’t a question of a slight tip in the balance—more like a necessary landslide. What would she have said if I told her I was already married, that I’d gone and secretly eloped with the boss’s son? The sense of shame came over me again. It was like something soggy seeping into my physical body, bringing me down. How had my life gotten so tangled?

  “Okay, I’ve done my duty and said my peace about that,” Ms. Singer said in a cheerful voice. “Now let’s move on to something else.”

  We finished our lunch in a punctual manner—no extra martinis or cigars after lunch for Ms. Singer—and I hurried back to the office. I can’t say why I felt so blue, but I did. I liked my job working for Mr. Nelson just fine, and yet a tiny part of me couldn’t help but wish I could go back and do it all over again: moving to New York and hunting for a job and all of it. It would’ve been nice if I could’ve met Ms. Singer first instead of last.

  • • •

  Later that evening I came home to an unexpected sight. I turned my key in the lock and opened the door to find Cliff addressing an envelope and stuffing a stack of manuscript pages into it. I drew closer, and recognized the manuscript as the pages I’d been typing up for him.

  “Eden old girl!” he called out. He smiled, and I saw that he was in an upbeat, cheerful mood. “Come, sit down.” He shepherded me over to a folding chair beside the card table.

  “Now,” he continued, “I know I’ve put you through a lot these past few weeks.” I assumed he was referring to the disaster with Rusty and Miles at our party, the wrecked hotel room and corresponding bill I’d had to pay after he’d won a prizefight at the Y. I eyed the manila envelope warily, hoping he wasn’t about to ask me—yet again—to slip the manuscript to his father as an anonymous submission.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, following my gaze and reading my mind. “My point is I’m sorry, and my apology is to leave you out of things, just as you requested. You know, I’ve hit upon the crux of the problem: All this time I’ve been dancing around the subject with My Old Man. I’ve never once come out and asked him to plain read my work! Can you believe? So, after chewing it over pretty good, I’ve decided to approach my father once and for all, man-to-man.”

  I was shocked. It was, I thought, perhaps the first time I’d ever heard Cliff use the term my father instead of My Old Man. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this.

  “I’m submitting my manuscript myself,” he said proudly, “the good, old-fashioned way. I’m going to make this strictly business: a real bona fide submission, from me to him. Going to mail it and everything!”

  “Wow,” I said, slightly impressed, slightly horrified. My mind flashed immediately forward to what Mr. Nelson would say, if he in fact took the trouble to read Cliff’s manuscript in its present state.

  MILES

  53

  Without consciously intending it, I had begun writing a memoir of sorts. On a whim, I’d picked up a composition book at a stationer in San Francisco, and before I knew it I was filling up the pages. I began to write down every childhood memory of my father I could recall. Other times, I rewrote the anecdotes in my father’s journal. I alternated between my memories and his, strategically folding two halves together—the war hero and the old man in his armchair—so that they made a whole. It was a curious sort of call-and-response memoir. For me, it was also cathartic: a way to reconcile the avalanche of information I’d gained about my father upon recovering his journal with the thoughts and questions I’d had about him as a child.

  “Listen to this,” I would sometimes say to Joey, reading a passage from my father’s journal I had rewritten, or sometimes—when I was feeling especially brave—a passage written in my own voice, constructed out of my own memories. He would stop his happy whistling and put down whatever he was tinkering with and listen carefully, nodding along as though impressed.

  Most of the time I knew his quiet demeanor and sober, attentive expression were donned purposely for my benefit, as Joey’s natural state was a chatty and merry one. But one day, as I was reading one of these passages aloud, a shadow passed over Joey’s face that struck me as far more personal, and slightly anguished.

  “Something wrong, Joey?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, but the shadow was still there. I closed my composition book and looked at him more carefully.

  “You mentioned your uncle once,” I said, blindly guessing at the source. “That he was the one who took you out of boarding school.”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened after that?”

  Joey shrugged. “It’s not important.”

  “Please, I want to know. From what you’ve said, he didn’t always live with you. Why did that change?” We were outside on the narrow deck that wrapped around the entire perimeter of the houseboat, and Joey was crouched over a broken electric toaster he’d found, trying to repair the contraption just for the hell of it. “Was he your father’s brother?”

  Joey shook his head. “My mother’s. Her family did very well breeding horses—really impressive ones that ran in the Derby—but the truth is my uncle lost most of the family money betting. Around the time I was sixteen, he had to come live with us because he was flat broke.

  “That wasn’t what he told people, of course. He needed an excuse, so he decided I was it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “He said he’d come to live with us to do right by his sister’s memory and ‘correct’ his nephew’s development.” Joey caught the expression flickering over my face. “He said I was too soft,” he explained, “that boarding school was turning me into a pansy. Of course, it wasn’t. But he’d visited me a year or two earlier at school, and I think he’d caught on to the way of things for me.”

  Joey did not say what he meant by the way of things for me, but he didn’t need to: I knew. I wondered if Joey’s uncle was what had come between him and his first love.

  “The loaded insinuation was all he needed to get my father to allow him to dole out whatever corrective measures he deemed necessary. When it came to his progeny, my father was always happiest when other people were put in charge of doing all the real work. He has no spine and knows it. So . . . all this is to say, after my uncle made his veiled accusation and offered to step in, he pretty much had free rein. Drunk, unemployed, and in debt, he made a full-time job out of bullying me under the pretenses of ‘home-schooling.’ I suppose it was an education of sorts, after all.” Joey shrugged again.

  I thought of Wendell, grateful that while my mother didn’t exactly stand up to him, she nonetheless did her best to keep me and Wendell separated from each other, and she never put Wendell in charge of my conduct in any way.

  “At least I knew what I was in for,” Joey continued. “My uncle had come to stay with us once before, just for a
week or so, a few months after my mother died. It was the first time I’d ever met him, and with my mother passed on, I remember being excited. I thought he might look like my mother, he might have her laugh, he might hold his fork the way she did . . . He didn’t look anything like her. I just remember noticing how red he was. His complexion looked perpetually sunburned, his hair was strawberry—his eyes, even, were bloodshot. His neck sweated a great deal; there were stains around all his collars. I was only seven. That time, too, he declared I was too soft. He took it out on me by teaching me how to hunt.

  “I’d told him about a little ritual my mother and I had of taking a walk around the property in the evenings and feeding the deer dried sweet corn. My mother had a special way about her; she could get the deer to eat out of her hand.

  “The first thing my uncle did was make me build a hunting blind with him. That was the kind of hunter he was, you see: the kind to stack the deck by sitting in a blind and putting out feed. It wasn’t terrible right away. I thought we were building a tree house at first. It may sound naïve, but I’d never killed anything in my life—not even a squirrel. I’d only ever shot BB guns at empty cans.”

  I was inclined to believe Joey on this score. I thought of the concern he’d shown for Cob’s insects that first night we’d met. Since settling into life on the houseboat, Joey was more often the one to feed and care for the insects in their little glass jars. He’d gone so far as to check a book on entomology out from the library.

  “We were up in that hunting blind when it happened,” he continued now. “It could be that I was just a kid, that it was only my imagination, but that first deer that walked into the clearing . . . I swore it was this one doe in particular, one that used to come around and eat directly out of my mother’s hand. We must’ve made a noise, or else she caught wind of us, because she looked up to regard us with her wet brown eyes, and she and I found ourselves locked in a stare. She was a beautiful doe, something regal about her, and gazing at her—for a moment at least—it seemed like I had somehow fallen out of time, that I was back with my mother, feeding the deer at dusk the way we always had.

  “But then my uncle dumped the rifle in my arms and shouted at me to shoot. I did as I was told. I said a silent prayer she’d get spooked and run away, but she froze.”

  “What . . . was the outcome?” I ventured.

  “Bullet caught her in the foreleg and tore through her knee. She staggered and fell, but then she tried to get up again. She ran a few yards, and fell . . . ran and fell, ran and fell . . . The sight of it made me sick. My uncle raged at me, complaining that I’d only wounded her and caused her a slower, more painful death.

  “Those words were what put me to shame. He beat me with the butt of the rifle until I was bloody, but I hardly remember the pain of that. It was the pain of that doe, out there in the woods, sprinting and falling, sprinting and falling, flailing and on the losing side of life, that hurt the most.”

  He looked at me.

  “That’s the part I still remember the most.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt bad for having brought it up, for having pressed him to talk. At the same time I was glad to know him better, to understand what made him tick.

  We made lunch. The dark shadow dissipated from his features. Joey appeared to have shaken it off. For the remainder of the afternoon and evening, he was as happy as ever, puttering around the houseboat and whistling again like a canary.

  It wasn’t until later that night, after we’d gone to bed and slept for a few hours, that he hollered at the top of his lungs and sat up under the covers, dripping with sweat. I knew immediately he’d had a nightmare, and I knew, too, what the nightmare was likely about. I wasn’t sure how to help, other than to soak a washrag in cold water and hold him while pressing the cool rag to his forehead.

  It was unexpected and new to me, this vulnerability of his. It was the first time I saw it, and I didn’t quite know what to make of it. It’s true to say it made me love him more. But if I am being honest, it also made me more afraid of everything we were, everything we were doing to each other, and, most especially, everything we would do to each other in the future.

  54

  We began to experience the kind of growing pains that all lovers experience whenever they move in together and begin to play house. Which is to say, Joey’s way of doing things was not my way of doing things, and vice versa. The major difference in our habits was, I believe, one that had its roots in class and race. In many ways, the color of my skin dictated mine, Columbia education be damned. I was aware of what little advantage life had afforded me; I was careful not to bring unwanted attention on myself. I had mastered the art of invisibility.

  Joey, on the other hand, was privileged, and white, and had mastered the art of being seen. His uncle’s beatings had only made him more determined to do as he pleased with his life, and he was only careful when it came to avoiding detection from official sources. From his tales, I deduced he had toed a fine line in the Army. These were tales that made me nervous.

  One of his favorite habits on the houseboat was to lie on the deck sunning himself, naked as the day he was born, eating cherries and spitting the pits into the water.

  “We don’t want to attract attention,” I often reminded him.

  “I’m getting a sun-tan, not robbing a bank,” Joey would reply, waving me off.

  He refused to take things seriously, even when the Coast Guard made a turn of the harbor, patrolling. I tried to shoo him off the deck and back inside, but of course I’d have been better off herding cats. Instead, I wound up ducking inside while he grinned at the officers and made a jokey salute as they passed. This happened more than once. I was shocked and vaguely terrified—and, in all honesty, also a little amused in spite of myself—when one day Joey managed to invite them to come aboard our deck and have a beer.

  Joey’s charm produced that effect—such scenarios as you could hardly believe. His charm was, without a doubt, his greatest strength and most attractive quality. So it unnerved me one day to realize how profoundly it also bothered me. I remembered his casual familiarity with the YMCA and felt a terrible, deeply-annoyed jealousy. I’m afraid to admit, I judged him: He was too brazen, too comfortable, too easy with himself, and I wanted him to understand how dearly we might pay for this.

  My irritation with Joey took on a strange form: I found myself hiding behind Janet.

  “You ought to know,” I said to him one day, “I’m not like you.”

  Naturally, he wanted to know what I meant. I told him I had a girl back home whom I planned to marry.

  “Sure,” Joey said, shrugging good-naturedly. “But that’s nothing very serious.”

  I blinked at him. “What do you mean, ‘nothing serious’?”

  “I mean, of course you have a girl.” I searched his face for sarcasm but found none. He asked me a few questions about Janet—mere details, really. How did she dress, where did she live, what kinds of movies did we go to see, et cetera. He seemed idly curious, the way a kid might ask questions about life in China from a returning tourist.

  “You don’t seem bothered by all this,” I said.

  “Why should I be?” Joey replied, shrugging. “She sounds fine—very down-to-earth and all that—but you can’t have the same kind of feelings for each other as we do. It’s not the same thing.”

  “We’re expected to marry. I wish you’d take this more seriously.”

  “Nah,” he said, slipping his arm around me. “You just wish I was more like you: a grumpy old bastard in a young man’s body.” He winked, and I sighed in resignation.

  • • •

  One afternoon I was alone on the houseboat, transcribing pages from my father’s journal, as had become my routine, when Joey’s friend Eddie came looking for him. It was a pleasant day, and I had thrown all the windows and doors open to let in the fresh air. It was very quiet,
and I had lost myself entirely to the stillness when an abrupt rap sounded on the open redwood door and Eddie poked his head in. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and the brilliant flash of sunshine on his white-blond hair nearly startled me out of my chair.

  “Whoa, fella,” he said, holding his hands up in surrender. “Sorry about that, chief.” I hadn’t seen him since our late-night cruise down Lombard Street in Bill’s Fairlane, but I recognized him easily. As he stood in the doorway he cut a distinctly lanky figure against the bright sunlight pouring in behind him. He looked like a boy who had just run in from a cornfield in Iowa or a wheat field in Nebraska. You almost expected to find a few stray pieces of straw in that white-blond hair.

  “I guess we don’t have a lot of folks dropping in unexpectedly,” I said, pulling my nerves back together and giving a good-natured chuckle. I had liked Eddie that first night I met him; he seemed straightforward, gentle.

  “‘We’?” He grinned and arched an eyebrow, making me slightly uncomfortable.

  “He stepped out,” I said, meaning Joey. “There’s some beer, I think.”

  “That’d be swell,” he said, nodding, and I went out onto the deck to fetch up two bottles. We didn’t have an ice-box on the houseboat and Joey had solved this lack of a modern appliance by putting the sealed bottles of beer in a crab trap and lowering it into the chilly water. Eddie came outside and watched as I hauled up the rope and opened the trap.

  “Looks like one of Joey’s bright ideas,” he said, pointing to the crab trap with a faint smile playing on his lips. There was a twang to his Kentucky accent that Joey did not have. I opened one of the beers on the deck railing and handed it to him, then opened one for myself. Despite the fact the beers were sealed, there was always a faint odor of motor oil and just the tiniest hint of brackish seawater about them. We went back inside and sat awkwardly on the two deck chairs in the middle of the room. The breeze wafted in from the open door and the sound of water softly slapping the moorings drifted up to us.