“Was she really lumpy and peevish?” she asked.
“Well, sort of. She always seemed irritated about something whenever you talked to her.”
“Humph,” she said again. “Just be careful she isn’t building herself up at your expense, that’s all.”
“I will,” I told her. “I get the showing off, and I can even understand the digs. We weren’t exactly friends way back then. What I don’t understand is why me?”
“Frankly, I’d watch my back around her,” Isabel said. “My theory is that people’s characters are formed by age eleven and everything after that is just veneer.”
“God, I hope not. I was an awful brat at eleven, to hear my mother tell it. Anyway, I don’t really mind being her audience. I see what she’s doing, and I can live with it.”
“Yes, but that’s your motto,” she said lightly. “Becky?”
“What?”
“You’re not going to let her mess with your head, are you? I mean, you know I think you should allow yourself to have more fun, but you don’t need a ‘mind-body-spirit makeover,’ whatever that is.”
“Don’t worry; it’s probably nothing worse than herbal tea and a good night’s sleep,” I told her. “And anyway, I told her no.” I laughed. “I may go on and on about body parts that flap in the wrong direction occasionally and the extra five pounds I’d like to lose, but I draw the line at major remodeling. I have no desire to be one of Bobbie’s ‘projects,’ believe me.”
“Good,” she said. “Just checking.”
Isabel was the kind of woman I wanted to be; I’d known that from the moment I’d first seen her, picking out paperbacks at the monthly used book sale held by the library. And not just because she’d bagged the best books already—Animal Dreams and The Realms of Gold and Persian Nights—by getting there first. There was something quietly confident about her demeanor, without being overbearing or brash. She had discipline too and the courage to rebuke. Later, when I got to know her, I remarked on these qualities. She told me she’d had a military upbringing, which, if you were the type, was the best possible preparation for life. All that moving and changing, she said, was a tonic. It toughened you or it killed you.
“Isabel?”
“I’m here.”
I love you. “Thanks,” I told her.
“Don’t mention it,” she said.
Carole’s house was near the top of a steep hill. Statistics published in the newspaper indicated that 131 houses in La Jolla had opened escrow in the million-dollar housing market in the first half of the year. The average price was $1,824,259. That kind of price was the only respect in which Château Pratt would qualify as average. I parked in front and cropped the wheels into the curb. I would like to have leaked oil onto the driveway, but the Lexus was blocking my way.
Carole and I, despite our separate attractions, brought out the worst in each other. The difference between us was that she didn’t have to try to hide it for the sake of her children, and I did.
Although she was allegedly expecting me, the wrought iron gate, which would not have been out of place at a monastery in Spain, was locked. I rang the bell. I waited. I rang it again.
Andrew opened the door and walked into the courtyard. He was, I was forced to admit, an extremely handsome child, a miniature of Richard at the same age. He peered at me through the gate. “Hello, stupid,” he said.
Carole followed him out the door carrying a tennis racket. Her legs were tanned, even though it was only March. “Andy, that’s rude,” she said without much conviction. “We don’t speak that way to anyone, no matter who it is.” She looked at me. “Sorry,” she said, as if the admission cost her an effort.
“No problem,” I told her. And it wasn’t, at least not mine. In another ten years I thought she would come face-to-face with the error of her child-rearing ways, but by that time, trust or no trust, I planned to be out of the picture.
We were at an impasse. The check was clearly in the house, which meant that either she would have to invite me in or leave me unsupervised with her son or her property or both.
She chose to keep me where she could see me. “Won’t you come in?” she asked formally.
“Thank you,” I replied with equal ceremony. We might have been ambassadors of rival nations meeting at court. “I won’t keep you. I have to get back to work.”
Carole left me in the living room, while the au pair, an exhausted-looking student from Denmark, collected Andrew and whisked him away to the backyard. The house was very well furnished, although to my taste a little too crowded with “collectibles” and a little too lacking in books. Another reason I didn’t want her in my house making assessments about me.
Moreover, now that I was into noticing, I discovered that the honeymoon picture of Richard and Carole in Bali, once displayed in glorious prominence on the mantel, was missing. I considered Carole’s tan, her tennis, and her overall sleek look. I wondered if she was seeing someone. She certainly was an attractive prospect (if you didn’t mind serving as an acolyte at the shrine of Andrew); she had looks, and thanks to Richard’s life insurance and the trust, she had money. In addition, she was still young enough for a second family. At all events, I certainly hoped she might be. If she remarried, the trusteeship reverted to a bank.
As there was no possibility of asking her outright or even of skirting delicately around the subject, I contented myself with sitting on the edge of a chair, hands folded in my lap. Presently she came back into the room, holding the edge of the check as if it were a dangerous species of reptile. She thrust it at me.
“Thank you,” I said, giving it a quick peek to make sure it was for the correct amount. It wasn’t, but it was only off by a few dollars. Not worth making an issue over. With Carole, issues had a way of coming back to haunt you.
“It’s ridiculously high, the tuition,” she said, averting her face from me.
I felt a twinge of discomfort. When people won’t look you in the eye, they usually have something unpleasant in mind to say. “Yes, and David gets a scholarship,” I said mildly. “Think what the costs will be by the time Andrew is ready for school.”
She sniffed. “Still, doesn’t it seem a bit…excessive…to pay that much when he could just as easily go to a state school?”
Little alarm bells went off in my mind. “A state school?”
She shrugged. “What’s wrong with San Diego State? He could save even more by living at home.”
I said, very carefully, “Richard and I agreed that it would be best for him to go away to college, years before David even graduated from high school. We wanted both our children to have the residential college experience that we had.” Carole had gone to State herself, like half of the rest of San Diego, so it would have been tactless to impugn its academic reputation. “Besides,” I said, “Richard went to private school.”
“Richard,” she said, invoking the name like a talisman to ward off evil, “was going to be a doctor. Your son is studying—what?—physical education?”
“Communications,” I said, struggling to keep my temper. “He wants to be a journalist.”
“A journalist.” She closed her eyes. “How…useful.”
“It’s what he’s good at.” I strove for a tone of levity, despite my pounding heart. “Come on, Carole, it’s not as if he’s expressed a lifelong interest in opening a Chippendale’s franchise. It’s still a perfectly respectable ambition. Didn’t you see All the President’s Men?”
“Yes,” she said. “We rented it once. It bored me to tears.”
Oh.
“After what those dreadful animals did to poor Princess Diana, I wonder how anyone could even consider such a field,” she said. “Anyway, I think it’s only fair to warn you that we might need to reconsider the tuition payments. I’m not sure that giving him that much is justified, under the circumstances.”
I felt an edge of panic. “You’re not saying there isn’t enough in the trust fund to cover it?”
She
looked away again, at a spot over the top of my head. “As a matter of fact, some of our investments haven’t worked out as well as I’d hoped. So, yes, the return on the principal has been reduced.”
I gasped. “You haven’t been putting the money into something superspeculative or anything like that?”
She glared at me. “I have an excellent investment adviser. Unfortunately, no one is right a hundred percent of the time.”
“Carole,” I said, scarcely breathing, “this is our children’s education we’re talking about. You have to be responsible. You can’t take risks.”
“I have other sources of income,” she said, “as do you.”
“But—”
“I don’t want to argue about it with you. If Richard had had faith in your judgment, why didn’t he name you trustee?”
Because he was probably hoping it would work out just like this. Wherever Richard was, he was no doubt looking up (or even down, but I doubted it) and savoring this moment. His little plan to get back at me was working perfectly. I wondered if there was any way to put a stop to it.
“Carole,” I said, clasping my hands together so hard my fingers turned white and bloodless, “I know we aren’t exactly friends—”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“And I know you resent me for reasons that we probably don’t need to go into now, but—”
“No, let’s do go into them,” she said. “I do resent you. I resent the fact that you wrecked your own marriage and then you made so many unreasonable demands you wrecked mine too. You helped kill my husband. You knew he was under a lot of stress from working so hard, but you wouldn’t let up. You took my son’s father away. Resent? That’s hardly a strong enough word for it! And now I have to keep seeing you. It’s too much.” Despite her anger, she kept her voice low enough so that Andrew and the au pair couldn’t hear. I was grateful for that.
Breathe deeply. Count to ten. I could hear Dr. Lawrence’s maxims in my mind. “This is pointless,” I said finally. “Can’t you see how futile it is to blame everything on me? Richard was a fine man, but he certainly wasn’t blameless for what went wrong in our marriage, and—”
“But you had the affair,” she pointed out triumphantly.
I flushed. “Richard shouldn’t have told you that,” I said quietly. “It was between us. And anyway, it wasn’t an affair. But that’s all I’m going to say about it.”
I’d told Dr. Lawrence, though. I’d slept with someone I wasn’t in love with, didn’t even like much, in fact. Richard and I weren’t separated yet, although the subject had come up. Not that that’s any excuse. I’d done it partly out of curiosity, partly out of loneliness, and partly out of motives that probably don’t have to be explained. None of them made me very proud, even before Richard found out, which he was bound to since the affairee was another doctor in his hospital whom we saw socially. He was divorced too. I didn’t like to think about it, but I’d done the best I could to work through it honestly with the therapist. Nevertheless, I wasn’t too keen on discussing it with Carole.
I had to wonder how Carole had dealt with the fact that medicine was the only truly absorbing interest of Richard’s life. Maybe it had been different between them, but I doubted it. When we were married, Richard’s work was the only thing that really moved him. His conversation wasn’t an exchange—it was a series of stories about somatic dramas.
It had taken me a long time to catch on. He had a powerful and conspicuous life, but I wasn’t an important part of it.
So what? you might ask. It’s not as if there weren’t any perks. It’s undeniably nice to have a vehicle that comes from Symbolic Motor Cars instead of Leo’s New and Used, not to mention a view of the Pacific Ocean, granite countertops, Manolo Blahniks in the closet, and a lot of other tangible benchmarks of affluence. But the trouble with parallel lives is that they don’t, well, intersect.
Richard had not been sympathetic to my dissatisfaction, which, in retrospect, was probably tedious. “What are you complaining about?” he asked me. “You have time, you have help with the children. You can do anything you want. You can be anything you want.”
The truth is, I didn’t know then what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be. I thought all I wanted was Richard, the way he was—or the way I thought he was—at the beginning of our marriage. When my heart leaped up at the sight of him, when I didn’t have to tease “I love you” out of him as if it were the prize in the Cracker Jack box. By the time I finally asked him to leave, my heart hadn’t leaped up at anything in a very long time. Maybe that’s why I found the courage to go through with the divorce.
Carole was studying me with dislike. Part of the reason for her animosity toward me was that she obviously thought I should envy her, and I didn’t.
“The point is,” I told her, “that whatever you think your grievances are with me, you must exercise prudence with the trust. Richard’s whole purpose in setting it up was to protect his assets so that money would be there for all of you when you need it. My children are counting on that money for their educations. They’re innocent victims here.”
“Victims?”
I couldn’t shriek at her the way I felt like doing or she would take it out on David and Allie, if she could. I decided to try another tack. I drew a breath. “Richard loved Alicia and David just the way he loved Andrew. As you say, he trusted you to do the right thing by them. I’m sure when you remember that you’ll try to put our differences aside.”
I sounded a bit like a self-help manual, and one glance at her told me she wasn’t buying it.
“Actually, I doubt that very much,” she said, walking toward the front door.
I rose. “Then why not just give up the trusteeship? Let someone disinterested decide how the money should be invested and spent. You don’t want to keep seeing me, and I feel the same about you. This is the perfect way to take yourself out of the picture altogether. It lets you off the hook.”
“I don’t think so, Becky. That would be letting Richard down.”
And you’d lose the administrative fees paid to the trustee, not to mention access to the principal, I thought, but I didn’t say it. As both a beneficiary and a trustee, Carole enjoyed a great deal of latitude about how the money got spent. Or wasted.
“Besides, as you know, the trustee is not legally responsible for unhappy investment results, as long as she picks her adviser with care.” She smiled enigmatically. I wondered who was advising her.
“If you violate the spirit of the trust, I’ll take you to court,” I told her.
She regarded me speculatively. “I don’t think so,” she said. She opened the door and gestured with her head. “And if you harass me any further on this, I’ll make you very sorry. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a tennis match.”
Chapter Eleven
“What time shall I pick you up?” Taylor asked me.
My mouth dropped open, an expression unlikely to be flattering much after infancy. I couldn’t help it. Taylor Anderson, in shirtsleeves and tie—not to mention a crinkly smile and mesmerizing blue-green eyes—was filling the door frame of the conference room, offering to pick me up.
It’s just a ride. Get a life.
I must have sat there gawking rather longer than the question necessitated, because eventually Lauren poked me under the table.
“Anytime,” I said. It came out as a sort of squeak. “If it’s not too much trouble,” I added.
“No trouble. I don’t live all that far from you, so we might as well go together.”
He knew where I lived. “Eight-thirty?” I asked him.
“Fine,” he said. “See you then.”
Okay, so it wasn’t a date. We were just going to Bobbie Crystol’s command performance at the Convention Center. But until two minutes before, I’d assumed we were going in separate cars. I wouldn’t have been surprised if we hadn’t even sat together. A cool, professional, independent woman like me certainly didn’t need an escort to what was es
sentially a business occasion. I wondered what I should wear. Suede? Linen? Casual cotton? And loafers, maybe? Or…
“Becky?” Lauren was looking at me rather too perceptively, so I hastened to return to Earth.
“Sorry,” I said. “Where were we?”
She smiled somewhat enigmatically. “I’m not sure.”
I jerked my mind back to the papers on the desk. Leases. FDA guidelines. EPA regulations. Tax codes. There were so many issues involved in advising somebody setting up a company—and in Bobbie’s case a laboratory as well—and I didn’t have the experience even to identify them all, much less handle them. I had to have help.
“I really appreciate this,” I told Lauren. I did too. I might have had to work with Melissa instead. “I couldn’t handle all this alone.”
She smiled. “Knowing that is half the battle. Generally I don’t think it’s a good idea for first-year associates even to worry about getting their own clients, as I think I told you.” She grinned at me. “No matter how brilliant and talented you are, you need several years of experience before you solo on a client. More, for one like this.” She made a wry face, which told me a lot about her opinion of Bobbie. “Taylor’s being generous in letting you take a crack at the work yourself,” she added. “In some firms, a partner would take over automatically.”
The trouble with law school is that you don’t know anything useful, in the practical sense, when you come out. You’ve learned to “think like a lawyer” and, worse, write like one, and you’ve got a lot of judicial principles down pat. If you’ve worked especially hard (or are exceptionally lucky), you can explain the Rule Against Perpetuities (the Holy Grail of murkiness) in a reasonably knowledgeable way. But that doesn’t mean you know how to write somebody’s will. The truth is, nobody should turn over his work to a new associate, whatever the certificate on the wall may say about passing the bar. Every day of my first year I was constantly being reminded of my inadequacies.
“My turn to get the coffee,” I said. I went into the coffee room and poured two cups. The staff took turns making fresh pots all day long. Once it had been my job too.
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