by Libby Malin
“I heard from Gina,” I say breathlessly after silence passes between us. “She’s pregnant.”
“Really? That’s great. Tell her I said congratulations.”
“Yeah, it is great,” I say, and we both know what I mean. She can be happy about it but Wendy couldn’t. “She said Fred’s happy as a clam, too.”
“That’s nice.”
We’ve exhausted the things we can say without hurting each other, so I reluctantly get ready to hang up.
“Sounds like a great opportunity for you,” Henry says before I offer my farewells. “I’ve been to Europe only once, too. During college. I’d like to go again.”
“Yeah, it’ll be great. I need the break.”
He doesn’t say anything else, and now I’m really thinking he wants to tell me to stay but he can’t possibly do that when he’s just said it’s such a great opportunity for me because that would be selfish, right? He’s really being selfless by not saying it. So we’re stuck in this awful quicksand of competing good wishes.
“Thanks, Henry,” I say at last. “For putting me up.”
“The pleasure was mine, conchita.”
Henry doesn’t send flowers before we leave, but Sam does. They arrive in the morning before we head to the airport. A bouquet of tiny white rosebuds. I wonder why he waited so long, but then again, it was probably at the bottom of his to-do list, right after “seduce young coed” or “betray wife.” The card says, “Sorry to hear of your hospitalization. Sam.” He might as well have said, “Glory, hallelujah! Thank God the baby’s gone!”
Buds of a white rose mean “heart ignorant of love.”
Wendy does not ask me what they mean. She’s about to throw them away when I suggest she give them to her neighbor, an elderly woman who rarely gets out. So we leave them on her doormat with a cheery note.
Although Wendy’s still tired, she’s happy to be leaving. Like me, she’s leaving lots of “stuff” behind, shaking it into the wind like a dirty dust mop. After my confession to Henry about Rick, I feel free to tell others. So in the days before my departure, I let Gina know of my humiliation at Rick’s hands. Gina’s reaction was silence followed by “I never wanted to say anything, honey, but Rick always seemed a little insincere to me.” Good ol’ Gina. I know I can count on her to spare me the pain of telling Mom and Dad.
Wendy’s heartache is too fresh, though, to burden her with mine. I’ll tell her later.
To hell with my past. Onward and upward.
chapter 22
Hyssop: Cleansing
I started hankering for an in-ground pool almost from the moment I came out of my drug-induced daze after the accident. Being stuck in a hospital bed with tubes in your arms and beeping machines by your head makes you want to dive into something cool and wet where sounds are muffled and images are blurred and yet you still feel curiously alive under it all. Recuperating at my sister’s house, I would sit sweating in her living room, staring at her neat little backyard, thinking how it was the perfect size for a pool, and how if I dived in, my casts would dissolve and my limbs would be free, sort of the way Franklin Roosevelt would feel whole again once he was in some warm spring water somewhere.
I was in the hospital for two weeks, then in a rehab center for four, and finally landed at Gina’s house for the rest of my recovery that summer. Mom and Dad wanted to take me back to their place, but retreating to my parents’ home seemed like an ignominious defeat I could not face. The first week out of rehab, Gina took me to Rick’s grave where I leaned on crutches and squinted in the sun while she placed jonquils on the site. They mean “I desire a return of affection,” but I didn’t know that at the time. At her home, she pampered and babied me, fed me, and even washed me. I couldn’t take baths with the casts on, and this restriction most of all made me want a pool all to myself, some place protected and cool where I could swim and swim and be safe, and where my tears would mingle with the shimmering blue and no one would know why I was crying.
On the airplane to France, I have to take a sedative. It’s one of Wendy’s, prescribed by her doctor in case she needs help “getting rest.”
I thought I’d get a migraine. Instead, I get this overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. The walls are closing in on me. People surround me. I can’t breathe. Wendy gives me one of her pills.
Within ten minutes I’m asleep and I manage to miss the meal they serve as well as the whole flight experience, which is okay by me. The lack of food, though, means when we land I do have a migraine but I can’t take one of my magic pills because I’m afraid it will get together with the sedative and either kill me or do something worse—like make hair grow on my chest.
I don’t know if it’s the sedative or what but I have one of those strange dreams on the flight that seems so real that I feel like I actually experienced it, and am confused when I wake up.
I dream I’m back in my old bedroom in my parents’ house waiting for a date to show up. It’s dark and I stand at my window looking up the hill searching for the lights to his car. Ours is a quiet street so each car that comes down the hill makes me feel expectant and exuberant, thinking it must be his. It’s a happy feeling, waiting at that window, knowing I’ll have some fun and then be able to come home to my purple-skirted bed and be taken care of and loved.
And when I wake up, I want nothing more than to be back in that room.
I told you it was a strange dream. The thought of staying with my parents usually sends shivers up my spine.
When we land in France, the air is warm and close, which surprises me because I guess I expected it to be sweet and balmy since it’s so far away from humid Baltimore.
We’re booked into a first-rate hotel in Paris and on the taxi drive into the city, my problems with Henry and Rick flash before my eyes. That’s because Parisian cabbies have a death wish. I think they aim for pedestrians. Note to self: do not walk in Paris.
Even my migraine can’t dull the splendor of this city, though, and as soon as we check into our gold-and-red rooms, I decide to risk hair on my chest and take a magic pill.
With the headache receding, we both do some preliminary sightseeing, just kind of aimlessly wandering streets while we pinch ourselves to remind us that we’re really here. Wendy was right. This is like a high school senior graduation trip. All pleasure and no guilt. I could get used to it.
For the first week, we see all the usual haunts in Paris and its environs—Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, Napoléon’s Tomb, the Louvre, and some modern art museums. We take day trips to Versailles and Fontainebleau and I dream of Marie Antoinette and the Scarlet Pimpernel.
I buy cheap beads at an outdoor market and we end up eating two meals a day because we splurge on late and fattening breakfasts of croissants or pastries, then find cafés in the evening where we sip Cointreau and eat small portions of more fattening food.
By the end of the second week, I’m homesick for American flavors, so we head on over to the Champs Elysée and stop in at the McDonald’s there. Parisians might thrill to the heroic arches at the end of this grand boulevard, but it’s the golden arches that tug at my heartstrings.
Finally, we pack up and head for the “cottage” by the Riviera, taking trains and traveling through some areas that are fun to see but not worth stopping at.
As we travel, Wendy reverts to the culture of her heritage—wealthy, pampered and dependent on fashion. She starts reading Vogue again—except she doesn’t really read it since it’s in French. She just looks at the photos and comments on various items. She speaks curtly and loudly to porters, taxi drivers and vendors. Now I’m eager to get to the Riviera, where we’ll pretty much be on our own. I’m beginning to fear she’ll start an international incident.
Since her French is nonexistent, this means she experiences lots of frustrating moments with eye-rolling on her part and sneering on their part. I try to step in when I can, dusting off my high school French. A surprising amount comes back to me and my proudest moment
is when a couple in Fontainebleau ask me for directions and I manage to spout them out in perfect French, only to hear the man say “damn” with an English accent. They’d mistaken me for a native.
The cottage turns out to be a mini-villa that instantly makes me think this is the kind of place where Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald lived before they descended into alcoholism and lunacy. Set up on a ridge overlooking the Mediterranean, it has stucco walls and a red-tiled roof, lots of rooms, a walled terrace, and—drumroll, please—an in-ground pool.
At last, I have arrived at Mecca.
Or have I? The pool is not huge—no Olympic-size number, just some modest for-my-personal-use thing that the owner had installed. Just the kind of pool I’d envisioned in my pool-dreaming days. Private. Cool. Silent. It glistens and beckons in the sunlight like a jewel wrapped up just for me.
And you know what? After baptizing myself in its depths a few times, I find I prefer the beach. The pool is lonely and still. The beach, on the other hand, is filled with interesting characters and the sounds of people enjoying themselves even though it’s September.
Isn’t life funny? Here I’d spent a couple years hankering after an in-ground pool and when I finally get one—or at least the exclusive use of one—I find it’s not to my liking.
The few times I use it, I find myself thinking of Rick. But now those thoughts are not gossamer-coated memories of love or even painful examinations of the clues to his disaffection. They’re flashes of small things I didn’t like about him. Like the fact that he was a little snobbish. I’m sure he once feigned a stomachache to avoid having dinner with my parents. And he had an annoying habit of folding only his clothes after we did laundry together and leaving mine in a heap on the bed. And when he proposed to me, it hadn’t been over a romantic candle-lit dinner at an expensive restaurant. It had been after we’d laughed uproariously over a stupid joke, and he’d looked at me, his eyes bright with glee, and said, “We should get married.” And, you know, Rick was kind of awkward in bed, like an overgrown boy, quick and needy.
And, except for the yellow roses, he never once gave me flowers.
What a surprise—he wasn’t perfect. Don’t get me wrong—he wasn’t an ogre either. He just wasn’t like…
Well, he wasn’t like Henry. I know, I know—Henry’s not perfect either. But as I sit poolside, I realize that Henry’s pretty good. Henry is, as Gina described him, “a catch.” And I can’t see Gina describing Henry as “a little insincere.” If anything, Henry’s sincerity is both fault and asset. He won’t be trifled with, something I didn’t realize while I was with him.
He hadn’t brought Joanna Wentworth and Tess Wintergarten to the condo to seduce them. He’d brought them there to prod me. Tell me you’re over your former loves whoever they might be, he was saying, and I see only you. Just tell me, goddammit.
Okay, so maybe this technique was lacking in—ahem—the sweet milk of human kindness. Maybe I have a right to be irritated at his blunt approach. But I wasn’t giving him much to work with, now was I? He kept his heart safely locked away all right, but he had offered me the key and I had refused to open the safe.
The whole flower-sending routine was a sham. He wasn’t bedding those babes. He was merely drumming up business, just like he told me. He didn’t mix business with pleasure, and taking them out was obviously not pleasurable, whereas being with me was.
Since coming to France, I’ve replayed my last scene in the parking lot with Henry more than a dozen times. I keep struggling to remember our precise words because rekindling the anger and hurt assures me I was justified in walking away. But here’s the problem—the exact words are lost in a fog of dull ache and emotional confusion. I wonder if my lack of clarity is due to a desire to block out the things I wish I hadn’t said.
At some point, though, I realize my befuddlement is actually due to a desire to block out the things Henry hadn’t said. You see, I’d heard in my mind’s ear Henry telling me goodbye-get-lost a hundred different ways since I met him. It was only natural that some version of those words would seep into the memory of our big fight.
But he never said those words. Not in the parking lot. Not ever.
The first time I realized he hadn’t said them was when I was lying on a beach staring into glistening water, going over the argument for the fourteenth time. When I figured out he hadn’t uttered that phrase, I felt like turning to the bronzed body next to me and apologizing.
That parking lot confrontation was our first really big argument. It didn’t have to end with a breakup. It could have ended with a glorious reconciliation followed by a Deeper Understanding.
But I had become proactive, anticipating next steps. I was so sure, at the outset of the relationship, that the ending had already been written somewhere in the skies. Bring it on, I’d shouted to the heavens. Amy Sheldon can take it. She’s done it before. She’ll do it again. Lose a guy. Move on.
Henry is what he is. What you see is what you get. Except I didn’t get him, did I? No, I let him get away. Didn’t I say I had a knack for turning gold into dross?
After the pool loses its charm, I find myself skirting its landscaped sides and heading to the beach each day where I watch French families and French men (and some watch me) frolic in the drenching late-summer sun. Sometimes Wendy goes with me but she likes to bring her cell phone and often talks to her mother, who is fast becoming her best buddy. I read, book after book. Old favorites and new thrillers. Before long, I’m brown as a berry and feeling like a girl again at the end of summer vacation when going back to school doesn’t sound so bad after all. I’m restless.
Not that it’s a bad life. In fact, I highly recommend it.
Our daily routine consists of awakening around ten, eating fresh bread and strong coffee at a local café, changing into our swimsuits and sitting on the beach. Around three, we head for the cottage to nap, then we plan dinner. Going to the market and fixing it takes a couple of hours, then we sip wine on a cool terrace and talk about the future. Sometimes we go to a concert or sometimes we shop in the afternoon or write letters. I keep in touch with Gina every few days to see how she’s faring, which is stupendous, all systems go.
By this time, I am comfortable enough to share Gina’s pregnancy news with Wendy, and she’s feeling better enough to show some genuine happiness, even asking me about her due date and doctor. Not Bernstein, thank God, but some woman named Preston.
I still haven’t told Gina about Wendy’s miscarriage, but I figure by the time I get back Gina should be past the danger stage of the pregnancy and I’ll mention the news to her then. I’m actually looking forward to going back now. I’ll be able to spend some time with Gina, shopping for baby clothes with her, then retreating to Wendy’s old apartment, so I don’t need to worry about running into Fred naked.
I start plotting out a new job-hunt strategy. I will go to a career counselor and maybe even an employment agency and I’ll do “informational interviews” with any PR director I can think of. And if that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll go back to school.
As we sit on the beach every day in our cool sunglasses and oil-slicked bodies, I realize I’m starting to feel optimistic again. Somewhere in the last two years, those nerve endings must have been cut. Now they’re rejuvenating. Maybe this is a side effect of the magic pills.
The only thing missing from this paradise is Henry. Do I miss him? You betcha. Especially now that I’ve begun to realize that he wasn’t so bad, and he wasn’t unfaithful, and he was…well, he was probably in love with me, and he would have told me outright if I hadn’t been so sure he was going to hurt me. And I constantly wonder if it’s too late.
A week before we’re slated to come home, Gina calls again—on a Sunday—because Mom and Dad are over for an end-of-season barbecue. I sit in my sunny bedroom with its deep blue coverlet on the bed and pine furniture and gauzy curtains blowing in the late-day breeze. They all get on the phone, one after another, even Fred, who sounds crazy-happy, the k
ind of primitive happy a man can get when he likes the idea of getting a woman pregnant. My mother’s faraway voice almost makes me want to cry for some stupid reason.
As soon as I get off the phone, it rings again. And I’m thinking it’s Gina with something she forgot to tell me or Wendy’s mother who sometimes calls on Sundays at the cottage instead of on the cell phone.
But instead, it’s someone whom I don’t expect to hear from. It’s Henry.
When he hears my voice, he says, kind of formally, “Amy, Henry Castle here,” as if I have an address book filled with Henrys.
“Hi there,” I say shyly, and my heart starts to race in anticipation, because just the sound of his voice dredges up those old want-to feelings—I want to hear him saying things he’s never said, and I want to say some things myself that I’m still afraid to say. “Everything okay with Trixie?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah,” he says. “Look, I tried to call you yesterday.”
“We went to a casino.”
“Well, I had a message on my voice mail Friday for you. A Brian Ripton says he wants to talk to you about some new position opening up.”
Ripton, Ripton—the veep at the good college who interviewed me, the one to whom I spilled my life story.
“Did he leave a number?” I frantically look for a pen and give up when Henry starts giving me the number. I grab a lipstick and write it on the mirror. “Thanks.”
“Sounds promising,” he says, in a way that suggests he doesn’t want to get off the phone.
“How are you doing?” I ask, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Pretty good.”
I can’t resist. “Any new clients?”
I swear I hear him smiling. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
And I want to ask if he’s happy or if he aches a little for me the way I do for him, and if he thinks we could give it a try again or if it’s better to let it go and oh, by the way, do you still have women to your condo and when you said you thought you were falling in love with me, did that mean you did eventually fall in love with me but I was too blind and dumb to notice?