She Regrets Nothing

by Andrea Dunlop

  “Oh,” Liberty said. “Yes, I meant to update you. So, Opa met a woman, in Switzerland.”

  “A woman? He’s in his nineties, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, though it seems not to have slowed him down much.” Liberty smiled affectionately. “So now he’s found some hot-to-trot young girlfriend, not even seventy!”

  “A baby!” Laila said. Her mother, of course, would have only been fifty were she still alive.

  “Indeed.” Liberty rolled her eyes. “They’re traveling for a bit, he hates New York in the winter, but he’ll be back in the spring, I promise. I know you’re anxious to meet him, and I’ve told him all about you!”

  Laila nodded, trying to appear encouraged, though Liberty seemed to be assiduously avoiding any mention of what Frederick actually thought about Laila’s reappearance.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course!” Liberty said, nodding at the waiter who was gesturing to them about bringing another round. “Anything.”

  “I know you don’t know much for certain, but what do you think happened between my father and Frederick?”

  Liberty took a deep breath, as though considering the matter anew. “Well, it’s hard because after your dad died, it was totally off-limits to talk about it. Very healthy, I know. But I guess I always assumed that Opa was really hurt that your father moved your family back to Michigan, and it just . . . escalated from there. Then your father died, and there was no chance to reconcile. I don’t know. Opa has a good heart, but he is so stubborn. And I guess you really don’t become who he is without that quality, you know? He’s an immigrant; he grew up with nothing. I guess I always gathered that he felt betrayed by Gregory in some way, by his leaving New York. Maybe it felt like a rejection of what he’d built here. I think he always hoped to have both of his sons running his business someday.”

  Laila nodded. This was an interesting take. Evidently Liberty did not suspect the truth.

  “What is he like?” she asked. “As a grandfather, I mean.”

  Now Liberty’s face softened, as it was clear she adored the old man. “Honestly? He’s the best. I think it was easier for him to be loving as a grandfather than as a father, having that remove. My siblings are so much younger than me, and my parents were always so busy when I was growing up—my childhood was actually kind of lonely. If you want to know the truth, most of my best memories from growing up are with him.”

  “Well,” Laila said, smiling at the waiter as he set their next round of drinks down, “I can’t wait to meet him when he comes home in the spring.”

  That night when she got home, Tom was absorbed in some research for his book, and Laila took the opportunity to pull out the soft leather case she’d brought with her from Michigan that contained her mother’s little collection of scandalous mementos from Frederick. Since her conversation with Liberty about the lacquer bird pendant that had been her mother’s, she’d had it appraised. It was indeed a nineteenth-century estate piece, one worth approximately $20,000, and she’d kept it buried in the drawer of the nightstand next to her side of Tom’s bed, terrified of losing her only item of value. There was no wondering how her mother had come to acquire something so expensive—she’d complained many times that her husband was a cheap gift giver, so it certainly hadn’t come from her father. Frederick. She knew of his love for this kind of jewelry. Something with a history, something with a soul, Liberty had said in a rapturous little soliloquy about her and her grandfather’s shared love for estate jewelry when Laila had asked about the funny little charm bracelet with the jewel-eyed animals that Liberty often wore.

  As Laila considered the objects together, she began to see her mother’s affair in a new light. If Betsy had kept the pendant through many lean years rather than selling it, she must have loved the old man. And as this realization settled on Laila, so too did an entirely different explanation for why her mother had saved these tokens yet never gone to the Lawrence family with her story. With growing horror, she thought of her mother’s constant—though wholly ineffective—mission of personal improvement: the self-help books, the diets that seemed only to make her grow heavier. Betsy hadn’t played her hand with the Lawrences because she had foolishly held on to the hope of an outcome far more appealing than subterfuge: that she could restore her former beauty and win Frederick Lawrence back. Her mother hadn’t wanted blackmail. She’d wanted belonging.

  16

  * * *

  FOR TOM Porter, Laila Lawrence was a breath of fresh air. He’d had an early marriage to a poetess he’d met in his graduate program in Mississippi. On the lush campus, thick with green, glistening with the humid southern afternoons, their love had seemed perfectly of a place. They would sit together under the magnolia trees while she composed sonnets. Everything had been sublime and protected—they’d been married on campus; he was twenty-seven, she twenty-five. Once they moved to New York, however, the poetess’s charm had quickly tarnished. She’d accused Tom of selling out the moment he signed the deal for his first novel a year after landing in the city, a place that pulsed with money and ambition. They divorced after two years: the poetess moved back to Oklahoma from whence she came.

  Since his divorce, nearly a decade before, Tom had dated a steady stream of women who’d terrified him. Being from Boston, Tom thought he knew big-city denizens, but New York women were polished and fierce as warriors. They sized you up and spit you out. Men were always being told that they had the advantage numbers-wise in New York, but Tom felt made small by these women: so stylish, so aggressive, the masculine ethos of the city having seeped into their blood and made them a mutated form of the feminine. Amazon goddesses; Wonder Women all. Even his beautiful agent, on whom he’d at first nursed a debilitating crush, was alarmingly self-contained. He could never see her needing anyone, much less a man.

  But Laila . . . sweet Laila. He’d known from the first time he’d seen her in Liberty’s office, her lovely shy smile, her open expression, that she was purity and goodness. She was what his mother, a feisty, unbreakable Jewish widow who now lived with her best friend, would have called a “nice” girl. Leave the fact that she was not Jewish. She took care of Tom and did things no other woman he’d been with since his divorce had done: baked him muffins and rubbed his feet and listened to his stories about his work—fully and intently—without needing to immediately counter with stories of her own. She luxuriated in being a woman; there seemed no danger of her absorbing the masculine affect of the city. True, she was divorced—some awful dentist she’d worked for who’d taken advantage of her grief and then cheated on her—but an orphan. Her sadness rallied the strongest side of Tom: here was a woman who needed him, openly and ardently, something no other woman he’d met in the city would ever confess to. Tom knew it was hopelessly retro, but he loved that Laila did not seem terribly attached to her career—such as it was—and when he spoke of wanting children, a dreamy, faraway look would come over Laila’s face, a look he interpreted to mean that she too was longing for babies. And she wouldn’t need to work; Tom could support their little family, not in the city, of course—he wasn’t a billionaire, for God’s sake—but in a nice suburb in New Jersey or Westchester. Tom’s backlist was selling well, and he had a new book due in the spring, one he was secretly certain would be his ticket to the next level: it might be made into a movie, not simply optioned into obscurity as three of the others had. When Laila at last agreed to move in with him, he took this as a definitive step in this direction, and his own dreams of the future obscured his vision of the woman now under his roof. He made the fatal flaw too many male novelists are allowed: he assumed that he knew what women wanted.

  But alas, ever so slightly at first and then all at once, she’d begun to slip away. She’d been spending too much time with her friend Cece, for one thing—a girl Tom could form no reasonable objection to, except that she was tough in a way that made her seem vaguely imperious; he of all people would be mortified to ever admit that he preferred women
he didn’t feel were as smart as he was. And for another thing, Laila’s head was being turned by the glamour of the city. Where at first she’d been filled with wonder when Tom took her to Michael’s or to a reading at KGB, it soon became clear that she preferred the glittering nightclubs and fashion launches her cousins frequented: places packed with models and hedge-fund managers and downtown dilettantes, not a serious intellectual for miles. He wanted reassurance that he was all Laila needed, but when she came home announcing that she would be taking a trip to Mustique with “friends”—including Simon Beauchamp, a rich playboy so notorious even Tom had heard of him—he realized he had been sorely mistaken. Laila had not come to New York to rub Tom’s feet and bake him muffins. Up, up, up she went.

  “I don’t know why you’re throwing a hissy fit about this. I’m just taking a little vacation; am I not allowed?” Laila wasn’t naive. She knew that Tom would be livid about her going away with another man. But she had found herself in a bind. She had realized with a jolt several weeks back that she was tired of Tom. She had undergone that subtle but definitive transformation in which the idiosyncrasies of one’s lover go from endearing to grotesque: his habit of humming open-mouthed, the way in which he rubbed his hands together before sitting at his computer to write in the morning, offering up a cheesy platitude as though it were an invocation, sayings such as “The early bird gets the worm!” or “Another day, another dollar!” Suddenly it was with her again: no, no, no. This was not right, this was not her life.

  The allure of his fame had long since worn off. It wasn’t even a proper kind of fame. No one recognized him on the street; it didn’t have any noticeable effect on people whatsoever, unless they were at some literary event, stuffed to the gills with nerdy young strivers and crusty old people who were deeply impressed with each other, drinking until they fell over while eating decidedly mediocre food. The girls from the teen soaps whom Leo was always dating had more cachet. But she couldn’t very well just dump Tom; Liberty would be pissed, especially after she’d warned her about this exact thing.

  Tom had seemed to barely notice the erosion of Laila’s feelings for him. In their early, heady days, they’d discussed getting married, and he still referenced it—much to Laila’s bemusement. So when Simon the Billionaire (she couldn’t help but think of it all together that way, as though he were a superhero, which in the modern world he sort of was) had asked her to come to Mustique with him, it presented an obvious out.

  “You’re going to a private island with some rich old man you just met!” Tom screeched at her. He’d been writing in his pajama pants all day—a habit Laila detested—and she wondered if he’d even so much as brushed his teeth. When he got going, he told her, he sometimes went manic—forgetting personal care and feeding—he said this as though it were a thrilling altered state, but she found it more slovenly than inspiring. He had definitely not showered by the time Laila had arrived home that chilly March day, unwound her long scarf, placed her slouchy wool hat on the counter, and announced that she was taking a little vacation, leaving tomorrow for five days in Mustique.

  “It’s not a private island; it’s semiprivate, and there’s a whole group of us going. It’s not as though it’s a romantic trip. Simon is just a friend.”

  “Oh yes? And then why wasn’t I, your live-in boyfriend, invited?”

  Laila pondered the phrase for a moment: live-in had such a dull domestic quality to it, like live-in maid, live-in au pair.

  “Well, I’m a guest myself. I couldn’t very well go asking for a plus-one! I didn’t even think you’d want to go; you’re on a roll, as you keep reminding me. You’ve barely left the apartment in a week! Besides, you don’t know anyone.”

  “Neither do you! You just met Simon. And you’re insane if you think he wants to be your friend.”

  “I met him last fall, at the Earth Love party, six months ago at least,” she said, as though this were the point. Simon Beauchamp was a known womanizer whose name had spent plenty of time in the tabloids next to those of supermodels and actresses. Laila understood the appeal; his power was dazzling—it went beyond his money, though he nonetheless wouldn’t have retained it if the money disappeared.

  “I know two of the other women going.” She was lying, of course.

  “Laila, I’m not comfortable with it.” He said this as though it were the final word on the subject.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. You should work on your trust issues.”

  He looked at her, and she saw a flash of rage in his eyes.

  “Laila,” he said carefully, “you’re not going.”

  On the one hand, it was the most forceful she’d ever seen Tom, and she had to confess that this was something of a turn-on. And yet, the audacity of him to think he could just tell her what she would and would not do! He’d suddenly come full circle to remind her of her ex-husband, Nathan: You can’t just leave! What kind of woman are you? With the memory fueling her, she swept up onto her high horse.

  “Tom, I am going. If you don’t trust me enough to allow it, then we’ve got bigger problems.”

  And then she’d done it: opened the conversation she’d known would let her break free of Tom. It unfolded late into the night as they talked around and around it. By the time they finally fell into bed spent and exhausted, he was both begging her to reconsider and had become thoroughly convinced that the breakup had been his doing.

  Laila had run into Simon the previous week while she was out with Cece. Tom, holed up with his writing, could barely be bothered to take Laila out to dinner once in a while, let alone out dancing at a nightclub. She and Simon had merely chatted the night she saw him at Beatrice Inn, and that might have been it if she hadn’t gotten a call from him the following Tuesday.

  “Listen, darling,” he said right away when Laila answered her phone, “if you have plans for the rest of the week, cancel them and come to Mustique with us. It’s going to be loads of fun.”

  Blood rushed to her head. Mustique: an überposh island in the Caribbean, one of the most exclusive vacation spots in the world. It made Saint Bart’s look like a Sandals—or so she’d overheard one of Leo and Nora’s socialite friends say. She was ever attentive to details like this, convinced they were the key. At this point it was late March, and winter was clinging to the city, making a tropical getaway that much more appealing. Laila was used to hard winters but not the way they played out in New York. In the Midwest, you simply threw on your giant parka and headed from one heated space to another, via your heated car. If you were an outdoorsy type—which Laila was not—you could do any number of winter activities. In New York, the city seemed to be at war with winter from the moment it set in. The snow would blanket the streets, making everything peaceful for a too-brief moment, before the irrepressible mechanics of the city would begin churning beneath it once more, tracking dirt and salt into the pristine snow and piling it in great filthy drifts along the sidewalks. Now that Laila lived with Tom, she no longer had access to the car and driver that took the twins everywhere they needed to go. Tom, to Laila’s horror, mostly took the subway when he had occasion to leave the small radius of his neighborhood, which contained his apartment, the several restaurants he frequented, and the offices of Gerard Mills. Otherwise he walked, and so, now, did Laila.

  “Oh, I really couldn’t,” Laila said to Simon when he’d asked. “I’m so busy this week, and it’s not much notice for work.” She did not mention Tom, of course.

  Despite her protests, he carried on, talking about Alumbrera, the five-thousand-square-foot villa they’d be renting out for the week. Laila’s head began to spin as he described the vast outdoor spaces, the picnics they would have on nearby Macaroni Beach—It’s one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, did you know that? When he told her there would be a private chef on hand, she agreed as if that detail had finally convinced her, though she’d more or less been mentally packing her bags ever since he mentioned the word Mustique.

  She told Liberty
she was going away with a few friends for the rest of the week; sorry for the late request; did she mind?

  “Well . . . I wish you’d given me more notice. But if you can take a few manuscripts with you to read, I guess it’s okay. Is Tom going with you?”

  “Oh, no, he has to stay in town. He’s been working so hard on the new book. Honestly, he barely has time for me these days!” Laila said the last part with a forced cheerfulness. Perhaps she could come back to this reasoning when Liberty found out about their breakup.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear he’s being a crappy boyfriend, though of course, I’m always glad when he’s working,” she said, smiling. “Who are you going with?”

  “Some girls I know through Cece. I think Cece is going to try to come, but she wasn’t sure she could get away.”

  “Okay, well, be safe, and I’ll see you Monday.”

  She remembered Liberty’s words as she tried to calm her frayed nerves that night and get some sleep. “Be safe”: a simple enough platitude to offer someone heading out on a trip, and yet Laila knew that playing it safe was the last thing she could afford to do in her situation. What she needed was to be bold.

  17

  * * *

  THE DAY Laila was slated to leave for Mustique, Tom slept in long past his usual hour, and Laila crept around as quietly as possible in hopes of absconding downstairs to the airy hipster coffee shop below Tom’s apartment to wait for Simon, who was picking her up later that afternoon. But he woke just as she was doing a last inventory of her things. She’d overpacked, taking with her most of the things she really cared about with the understanding that, in the worst case scenario, they might not be here for her to collect upon her return.