The First Time

by Joy Fielding

  “This is a nice restaurant,” Mattie said, looking around. “I love the plastic grapes and the old wine bottles. It’s a nice change from the high-tech look you see everywhere these days.”

  “This place has been around forever,” Jake said. “The food is wonderful.”

  “Well, I’m looking forward to it. Suddenly I’m starving,”

  Jake checked his watch. Almost seven-thirty. Service was very slow tonight. They’d placed their order—angel-hair pasta with red clam sauce for Mattie, beet-filled ravioli and a Caprese salad for Jake—almost forty minutes ago. Jake had already polished off two glasses of wine. He should have ordered a bottle, he thought, although there was something unseemly about ordering a whole bottle of wine when you were the only one drinking. Mattie was sticking to mineral water, which was probably a good idea. It had been quite a day for her. He reached over, took her hand in his, felt the familiar tremble.

  “I’m okay, Jake,” she assured him.

  He smiled. Wasn’t he the one who was supposed to be reassuring her?

  “So you never told me about your interview with Now,” Mattie said.

  “Oh, God, that.” Jake shook his head. “It was a disaster.”

  “A disaster? How so?”

  Jake waved his hands in front of his face, as if trying to shoo away an unpleasant memory. “Ms. Isbister—”

  “Who?”

  “Wasbister.”

  “What?”

  Suddenly they were laughing, although Jake could tell by the puzzled look on Mattie’s face she wasn’t sure why. “The writer in question,” Jake qualified, chuckling over the image of the startled reporter struggling with her tape recorder as he was kicking her out of his office, “was interested in a more personal angle than I was willing to provide.”

  Mattie cocked her head to one side. “How personal?”

  “She asked about my parents, my brothers,” Jake said, as the image of Alana Isbister was replaced by the sad faces of his brothers, Luke and Nicholas. He tried to blink them away, failed.

  The waiter approached with Jake’s glass of wine. “This one’s on the house,” he said as Jake reached out to claim his glass, “with our sincere apologies for the delay. There were some difficulties in the kitchen, but they’ve been resolved, and your food should be out momentarily.”

  “No problem,” Jake said, raising his glass in a mock toast, seeing his brothers’ reflection in the dark red liquid. “Thank you.”

  “Pas de problème,” Mattie repeated quietly in French. “Merci.”

  “No fair. You’ve been studying.”

  “Every chance I get. I can’t believe we’re really going.”

  “Believe it, lady. Everything has been confirmed. Everything has been paid for in advance. Five more weeks, we are on our way to Paris, France.”

  “You sound excited.”

  “I am excited,” Jake said, realizing this was true. He’d been pretending to be looking forward to this trip for so long, it had become a reality. And no one was more surprised by this unexpected development than he was. “My brother Luke always talked about going to Europe,” he heard himself say. Why had he mentioned that?

  “Anywhere in particular?” Mattie asked.

  “Not that I can remember. He used to talk about hitchhiking from one end of the continent to the other.” What was the matter with him? Hadn’t he managed a successful detour away from his past? What was he doing circling around back? Clearly, the events of the afternoon had unsettled him, and the incident in the grocery store coupled with several glasses of expensive red wine had upset his normal equilibrium, loosening his tongue. Jake raised his glass to his lips, took a long sip. Might as well loosen it some more, he thought, as Luke winked at him from the bottom of the glass.

  “Talk to me, Jake,” Mattie encouraged softly. “Tell me about Luke.”

  Jake felt an immediate tug on his heart, as if the muscle had been caught by a fishhook and was about to be yanked, flopping about in useless protest, clean out of his chest. He looked to the corner of the restaurant, where Tweedles Dum and Dumber sat laughing easily with their wives. One of the Tweedle wives caught him staring and poked her husband, who turned, recognized Jake, and quickly poked his partner in turn. Soon all four Tweedles were smiling and waving at him from across the room. Jake dutifully returned their smiles, mimicked the exaggerated jauntiness of their waves. “My earliest memory is of my brother Luke screaming,” he said between tightly clenched teeth, returning his full attention to Mattie. Hell, he was the one who’d started down this road. He might as well go all the way.

  “Why was he screaming?”

  “My mother was beating him.” Jake shrugged. Standard procedure, the shrug said.

  Mattie’s face clouded over with pain. “How old was he?”

  “Four … five … six … seven … seventeen,” Jake recited. “The screams kind of blended together after a while. She beat him every day of his life.”

  “That’s so awful.” Tears filled Mattie’s eyes. “He never struck back?”

  “He never struck back,” Jake repeated. “Not even when he was bigger than she was. Not even when one good snap of his wrist would have sent the wicked witch flying into kingdom come.”

  “And your father?”

  Jake pictured his father in his brown easy chair in front of the living room fireplace, his face hidden behind the omnipresent newspaper in his hands, the thin paper as protective, as repellent, as a shield of heavy armor. “He never did anything. He just sat there reading his damn newspaper. When things got really bad, he’d put down the paper and walk out the door.”

  “He never tried to stop her?”

  “He had more important things to do than be a father to his children.” Jake paused, looked directly into Mattie’s eyes. “Just like me.”

  “You’re not like him, Jake.”

  “No? Where was I when Kim was growing up?”

  “You were there.”

  Jake scoffed. “I was gone in the morning before she got up, and I usually didn’t get home until after she was asleep for the night. When was I actually there for her?”

  “You’re there now.”

  “It’s too late now.”

  “It’s not too late.”

  “She hates me.”

  “She loves you.” Mattie reached across the table, grabbed Jake’s hand. “Don’t give up on her, Jake. She’s going to need you very much over the next while. She’s going to need her father. A girl always needs her father,” Mattie whispered, recalling the afternoon she’d phoned Santa Fe to tell her father of his new grandchild, only to be informed that Richard Gill had died of a sudden heart attack three months earlier. “You’re a good father, Jake,” Mattie said now. “I’ve watched you with her. You’re a wonderful father.”

  Jake tried to smile, his lips twisting from side to side, eventually collapsing with the effort, disappearing one inside the other as tears gathered force behind his eyes. He felt a shaking in his arm, could no longer be certain if the trembling hand was Mattie’s or his own. “I’m a fraud, Mattie. I’ve been a fraud my whole life. My mother knew that. She recognized that about me from day one. If she were here now, I’m sure she’d give you an earful.”

  “Why would I listen to anything that horrible woman had to say?” Mattie asked vehemently. “Why would you?”

  “You don’t know the whole story.”

  “I know you loved your brother very much.”

  Jake took another long sip of wine, emptying his glass. A quiet buzz settled in at the top of his spine, separating his neck, just slightly, from his shoulders, so that his head felt as if it were suspended, floating on air. He pictured Luke floating beside him, a tall, gangly kid, never really comfortable in his own skin. Always very quiet. Very sensitive. “In many ways, it was like I was the firstborn, not Luke,” Jake said, his thoughts translating themselves into words, sliding with surprising ease off his tongue. “I was the instigator, the organizer, the know-it-all, the
one who took care of business. He was the dreamer, the one who talked about hitchhiking across Europe, joining a rock ‘n’ roll band …”

  Mattie nodded encouragement, staring past Jake’s deliberately opaque blue eyes directly into his soul. He tried to look away, couldn’t. He didn’t want anyone looking into his soul. It was a dark, evil place he shared with no one. So he was amazed at the sound of his own voice continuing on, as if possessed of a will of its own.

  “When I was Kim’s age,” Jake heard himself say over the soothing buzz that had settled around his ears, “my parents rented a cottage on Lake Michigan for a couple of weeks. It was a pretty isolated spot, just a few other cottages in the area. Luke had just turned eighteen. Nicholas was fourteen. Nick was pretty much of a loner, even then, and he’d disappear first thing every morning. We wouldn’t see him again until it got dark. So, it was pretty much Luke and me together every day.

  “At first it was okay. As long as the weather was good, we’d swim, go for canoe rides, toss a baseball around. My father would sit on the dock and read his newspaper. My mother would lie out in the sun. But then it started raining, and it must have rained for three days straight. It didn’t bother the rest of us, but it drove my mother crazy. I can still hear her railing. ‘We didn’t put out all this money to sit inside some goddamn ugly cottage all day!’ Then she’d slap at whoever was closest. Usually Luke. ‘Put that goddamn book away. What are you, some kind of faggot?’ ” Jake shook his head, trying to rid his mind of the unpleasant memory.

  “Anyway, one of those rainy days, Luke and I were sitting in the kitchen playing Monopoly, and my mother was bored and irritable, and she started in on Luke, ragging him because he couldn’t beat his younger brother at a simple board game, the usual garbage that had been coming out of her mouth for as long as any of us could remember. And Luke just sat there and took it, the way he always did, waiting for the storm to blow over. Usually she’d run out of steam after a while, but she was angry because my father had gone into town, and she’d been drinking. When Luke didn’t respond, she grabbed Luke’s neat little stacks of Monopoly money from the table and tossed them into the air. Luke didn’t move, just sat there and gave me this little look we gave each other when things got really bad—it was kind of our little signal that we had things under control. Which, of course, we didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “She started calling Luke a fag and a disgusting queer, whatever filth she could think to throw at him. I told her to shut up, which normally would have shifted the focus of her anger to me, at least for a few minutes, but this time she just ignored me. I mean, she was cooking, she was on a roll. She was tossing cards and dice and fake money all over the damn place. Finally she picked up the board and whacked Luke over the head with it.

  “No reaction. He didn’t even lift his hand to block the blow. Just gave me that little look again. And my mother saw it, and of course it enraged her all the more. So she picked up a ketchup bottle that was sitting on the counter, and she threw it at the back of his head.”

  “My God.”

  Jake followed the scene in his mind as if he were watching a movie on TV, narrating it as it went along. “The bottle bounced off him and crashed to the floor. There was ketchup everywhere. My mother was screaming at Luke to clean it up. And Luke got up from the table really slowly, slower than I’d ever seen him move, and I thought, this is it, he’s going to kill her. He’s going to kill her.

  “But instead he just grabbed some paper towels from the counter and started cleaning up the mess. And he didn’t stop until he’d picked up every bit of broken glass, and wiped away every speck of ketchup from the floor, the table, even the walls. And my mother stood there laughing at him the whole time, calling him a dumb faggot over and over again. And he was down on his knees and he shot me that little look, and I knew he was waiting for me to give it back, but I couldn’t do it. I was so disgusted with him, so ashamed of him, so angry at him for not killing her, that I thought I was going to burst. You want to know what I did?”

  Mattie said nothing, staring at Jake with those wonderful blue eyes, those eyes that told him that it was all right, that she understood. Even if he didn’t.

  “I called him a dumb faggot, and I ran from the room.”

  Mattie’s eyes never wavered, even as tears began falling the length of her cheek.

  “And my mother threw her head back and laughed,” Jake continued, still hearing the horrible sound of his betrayal echoing through his mother’s victory laugh. “I ran out the door in the middle of that awful rain, and I kept running until my legs gave out. Then I hid in the woods until it stopped raining and got dark.

  “By the time I got home, everyone was asleep. I went into Luke’s room to apologize, to tell him that the person I was really angry at, ashamed of, disgusted with, wasn’t him. It was me. For not killing her myself.

  “But he wasn’t there.

  “I sat up waiting for him, but he didn’t come back.” Jake held his breath, released it in one painful whoosh. “We found out the next morning that he’d hitchhiked into town, got himself good and drunk, stole a boat, crashed it into somebody’s pier. He died instantly. We never knew if it was an accident or not.”

  “My God, Jake, I’m so sorry.”

  “Nice guy you married, huh?”

  “You were sixteen years old, Jake.”

  “Old enough to know better.”

  “You couldn’t know.”

  “He’s dead,” Jake said simply. “I know that.”

  Mattie wiped the tears from her eyes. “And Nicholas?”

  Jake pictured the sad-eyed, vaguely scruffy adolescent he hadn’t seen in over fifteen years. “Nick coped by drinking, doing drugs, dropping out of school. He had a few brushes with the law, spent some time in jail, moved out of town, dropped off the face of the earth about ten years ago. I have no idea where he is now.”

  “Have you tried to find out?”

  Jake shook his head. “What’s the point?”

  “Peace of mind,” she said simply.

  “You think I deserve peace of mind?”

  “I think you do,” she said.

  Jake felt a fresh gathering of tears behind his eyes. Had Mattie always been so damned understanding? he wondered, looking around for the waiter. Hadn’t he said their food would be out momentarily? What the hell was going on? How much difficulty could there be in preparing two orders of pasta?

  “My father moved in with one of his girlfriends shortly after Luke’s death,” Jake continued, unprompted. “He died of cancer a few years later. My mother claimed she put a curse on him, which I don’t doubt for a minute, but he must have put one on her too, because she died of the same cancer during my first year in law school.” Jake paused, laughed out loud. Better than crying, he thought “So there you have it,” he said, in his best lawyer’s voice. “The whole sordid tale.”

  “And you’ve been carrying around all that guilt for all these years.”

  “It’s guilt I’ve earned, don’t you think?”

  Mattie shook her head. “I think guilt is a waste of precious time.”

  Jake felt a vague stirring of anger, although he wasn’t sure why. “What do you suggest I do about it?”

  “Let it go,” Mattie said.

  “Just like that?”

  “Unless you enjoy torturing yourself.”

  Jake felt the anger ferret its way into the center of his brain, disturbing the pleasant buzz around it, sending it scattering in all directions. “You think I enjoy feeling guilty?”

  Mattie hesitated, lowered her eyes. “Is it possible you’ve been using your guilt as a way of hanging on to Luke?” she offered softly.

  “That’s a load of crap,” Jake shot back, startling not only Mattie but himself with the unexpected ferocity of his words. What was Mattie talking about? What kind of simplistic New Age garbage was she spouting? How dare she! Dying or not, what gave her the right? Who did she think she was, Joyce-fuc
king-Brothers, for God’s sake? Damn her anyway. Who the hell did she think she was?

  “I’m sorry,” Mattie apologized quickly. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just trying to he—hel—huln.”

  Jake watched Mattie’s mouth contort around the strange sequence of sounds. Instantly his anger was forgotten. “Mattie, what’s happening? Are you all right?”

  “F—foi—fo—”

  Jake could see the growing panic in his wife’s eyes. What the hell was going on? He should never have snapped at her. Damn it. This was all his fault. “Do you want some water?”

  Mattie nodded, took the water from Jake’s outstretched hand, her own hand shaking so hard Jake couldn’t let go of the glass. She sipped at it gently, swallowed carefully. “I’m okay,” she said slowly, after what felt like an eternity. But she didn’t look okay, Jake thought. She looked flushed and scared, her eyes those of a terrified woman confronting a would-be assailant.

  “Do you want to leave?”

  She nodded without speaking.

  The waiter approached with their dinners. “I’m afraid we can’t stay.” Jake dropped a hundred-dollar bill into the middle of the plate of steaming ravioli, then helped Mattie from her seat and quickly led her toward the front entrance, the waiter watching after them in stunned silence.

  “Jake … Jake!” Jake recognized the voices of his partners calling after him in unison, heard their footsteps close behind as he handed his coat check to the maître d’. “Surely you weren’t leaving without coming over to say hello.”

  Jake turned to face the Tweedles, better known as Dave Corber and Alan Peters. “Sorry. My wife isn’t feeling very well.”

  The two men eyed Mattie suspiciously. No doubt they were remembering her infamous outburst in court last fall, Jake surmised, and wondering about the rumors that had been circulating throughout the firm ever since about the state of Jake’s marriage.

  “I don’t believe we’ve ever had the pleasure.” Dave Corber grabbed at Mattie’s hand even as she struggled to get her arm through the sleeve of her coat.

  Mattie offered a weak smile. “Ma—Mor—Mana—”