“Oh,” he said, and lifted the bottle to our noses. It smelled musty and bitter. “Gimme that,” I said, and got up to get the one in the fridge. That one was dead too. “I have more,” I said, but he said never mind, and we spent the rest of the day on the floor. At one point he was up on one elbow and he said, “There is a rule with champagne, you know. You have to drink it. You drink it, and you replenish it. Drink, replenish, drink, replenish. It’s like love, Lillian.”
Fifteen years before I would have basked in his words, in the way he was stroking my hair, but suddenly I’d had enough of him. It seemed to me that he was making a veiled statement about Ted and me. I wanted to shout at him, You didn’t know us! No one did! It was fresh. It was always fresh! But I was too polite to put up a fight. When you protest too much they give you a look that’s even more condescending than their platitudes.
When Michael goes, whether he goes for good or not, I think I know another fellow who might visit. His name is Stanley. Terrible name, and he wears bow ties too, so I was ready not to enjoy his company, but he surprised me.
Judy had come to New York to attend a fund-raising dinner for the Friends of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and invited me along as her date. We found ourselves standing with drinks and cocktail napkins in front of a tall, deep-voiced man who said he loved art but not as much as books. He had a charming twinkle in his eye I felt like investigating, and he smelled good. I couldn’t place the cologne, and I usually can. He inclined himself toward me, and toward Judy too, I suppose, as she was standing next to me, and said, “What is it you find yourself reading the most?” It was such a surprise question, which is my favorite kind, and I’m usually very good at answering, especially at dinner parties, but it took me a while this time, because I love so many types of books, all types of books, that I didn’t know where to start, and then Judy jumped in.
“Lillian reads periodicals. She keeps very up to date.”
I could have wrung her neck. Even though the gentleman went on to ask me which newspapers I took and which magazines I favored, and on the surface we had a very pleasant conversation, I was so angry I found a way to get her alone when we were called to dinner.
“Why did you say that about the periodicals?” I asked her.
“Well, you do read them. You read them the most,” she said.
“I read lots of things,” I said. “In college they would always find me sleeping in the stacks because I couldn’t stop reading.”
“That was forty years ago, Lillian. You get two fat papers every day now and you let them pile up in anticipation of a day when you’ll actually get through more than a half a dozen pages.”
“Whenever it was, it was still me. I’m still that girl in the stacks, Judy,” I said, but I was speaking to her back. She went around to the other side of the table and sat down, opening up her napkin very primly, smiling at the men on either side of her and investigating the soufflé on her plate. The gentleman in the bow tie—Stanley—pulled out my seat so I could sit, which was some sort of consolation. No one had pulled out Judy’s chair.
Here’s what I want you to learn from this: Never let someone answer a question for you. Jump in with anything at all to make sure that you’re the one talking. Say, “That’s an interesting question,” or “I’m glad you asked that question,” or “Oh goody! My favorite subject!” Say anything that will guarantee that you’re in the conversation about yourself, and not out of it like a teenager standing next to her mother at a cocktail party.
You must tell your own story. Never let someone, even someone as familiar to you as your sister-in-law, think she knows you better than you know yourself. She only sees what you do; she doesn’t see who you are inside. If I regret anything when I look back, it’s how often I allowed people to think what they wanted to think. I should have stopped them short. I should have laughed at their assumptions. I should have hooted with laughter, “Hoo hoo hoo!” and followed with a twinkling, mischievous smile, just to throw them off, just to keep them guessing. The problem is, they watch what you do, who you love, how you cook, what you read and what you don’t read, and they decide what it means, and sometimes you’re not there to stop them, or you get the timing wrong. I’ve always wondered why people look so much to action for meaning. When people tell you a story—something that happened to them, something important—don’t ask them what they did. Ask them what they wanted to do. What they want to do is who they are. Actions are whispers compared to dreams.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Early encouragement and improvements for this book came from my gracious first-draft readers. Thank you, Charlotte Chiew, Tremaine du Preez, Alicia Erian, Hussein Khalifa, David Klopfenstein, Alyssa Landry and Nicole Stinton.
Thank you also, Andy Gurnett, for having me print and bind the manuscript so that you could read it like a book. Thank you for the interesting reflections that followed. And thank you, more than I can say, for proposing marriage.
If my mother weren’t the writer Valerie Lester, I wouldn’t have the sense of adventure that writing entails. If my brother weren’t the writer Toby Lester, I wouldn’t have such steady counsel in the wobbly times. If my agent weren’t Barney Karpfinger, whose ideas keep me lively and whose wisdom keeps me calm, I’d still be writing in isolation. Thanks also to The Karpfinger Agency’s Cathy Jaque for careful scrutiny and recommendations, and to Marc Jaffee, who read it there first.
I am gleefully indebted to Amy Einhorn. Thank you for your encouragement, your galvanizing energy and your clarifying insights. Thanks also to Liz Stein for being such a cheerful guide through the process, and to everyone at Putnam for the professional excellence there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison Jean Lester was born in the United States, and has variously grown up, studied, worked, written, and raised her two children in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Italy, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore. She currently lives with her family in Singapore.
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