After the Reunion

by Rona Jaffe

  “Peace,” she said.

  “My God, you are still so absolutely knockout gorgeous,” he said, shaking his head, and then he took the roses in one hand and her suitcase in the other and led her into his house. Then he put the suitcase on the floor and the flowers on top of it and gave her a hug that almost dissolved her bones.

  “’Still’?” she said. “It hasn’t been that long.”

  “It has to me.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  The inside of his house was like the outside; homey-looking wood furniture, some paintings, quilts and things. A lot of old movie posters. A fireplace, a piano. Books and magazines and scripts everywhere. “How long can you stay?” he asked.

  “A week.”

  “Good. I’m going to be working though, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “You can come watch if you don’t find it too boring.”

  She had come nearly three thousand miles to discuss their lives and their relationship and he was acting as if she had merely come for a week’s vacation. But maybe she was being too impatient. He was being civilized, and she’d had a tiring trip. Zack put her suitcase in his bedroom and showed her the closets and the bathroom, said he would put some things together for lunch, and went downstairs. While she was freshening up she thought twice about unpacking. Maybe their discussion, whenever they had it, would end in another fight. Well, she would worry about that when it happened. She compromised by pulling out a few things that would wrinkle and went downstairs.

  He had put the roses in a vase of water and arranged cheeses, fruit, salad, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of chilled wine in a cooler on the dining-room table. He seemed to be able to take care of himself very well. “How about a glass of wine and a tour of the house and grounds and then lunch?” he said. “The grounds takes three minutes.”

  “That would be lovely.”

  The rest of the house consisted of his home office and a large kitchen and another bathroom. The grounds consisted of an oval swimming pool, the bottom of which had been painted black so it really did look like a lake in Maine; more trees, some with little green fruit on them that seemed like possible lemons; lush landscaping, and a stupendous view softened by smog.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “You see what you gave up?” he said lightly.

  “I gave up more than that.”

  He smiled at her. When she saw that smile she wanted to go right to bed with him and forget about lunch. But that was how it had been with Dean, and this was Zack. Zack had meals first and sex afterward. Zack did everything step by step, and did not lie about love as Dean had. Zack did not mention love at all.

  He took her hand and they went to the bedroom and forgot about lunch until it was four o’clock and they were both starving. So he still surprised her, even in the things she thought she knew. Maybe she really didn’t know him as well as she thought. “I missed you so much,” he said.

  “Not as much as I missed you,” Annabel said. Oh, I love you, she thought. Why can’t you be in love with me? She pulled her bathrobe out of her still-packed suitcase and they went downstairs to devour everything on the table.

  “I want to explain to you why I ran away,” she said. “Will you listen?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not very attractive, when one is having a romance with a man, to tell him about all the other men who broke her heart before she ever met him. It is, in fact, guaranteed to chase him off.”

  “That depends on the man,” Zack said.

  “Well … let me finish.”

  “All right.”

  “Up until my marriage, to the wrong man I might add, it seems as if every man I ever fell in love with left me, and I kept trying to figure out what I did, and finally I decided that the most prudent thing would be simply not to fall in love with anyone at all. That lasted for years, and then I realized it was just not my nature to live without feeling anything, so I let myself fall in love again, even though I knew he was eminently the wrong man … and despite great dramatic protestations of love, he decided one day he had changed his mind.”

  “Who’s his analyst?” Zack said.

  She tried not to laugh. “Please,” she said. “This is serious.” She felt so relaxed and happy after making love with him that it was hard to feel tragic about what she was remembering. And then she realized that the reason it was easier to tell him now was that he really cared about her. She could see it in his eyes. “And when you and I were together in New York,” she went on, “I thought it was just … a week together in New York, and I began to feel too much for you for it to be only that, so I ran away and hid the last night because I couldn’t stand to say good-bye. I didn’t want any more good-byes in my life.”

  “But how was I to know that?” Zack said.

  “You couldn’t.”

  “Do you want to hear my side of it?”

  “Of course,” Annabel said.

  He took her hand. “Look,” he said, “I meet this independent, beautiful, intelligent, successful woman, who obviously has her own life, who had an entire life before she ever met me, and I think: maybe I’m making a mistake to fall in love with her. Okay, so then I think: maybe I’ll invite her to spend Christmas in California with me. We’ll play it by ear, see how it goes. We both have busy lives, careers, our own needs. She’s not some little girl waiting for me to rescue her, to give her an identity, charge cards, parties to go to. She has all those things. I wouldn’t be saving her; I’d be asking her to give things up. And I couldn’t do that to you. And, to tell you the truth, I was busy with meetings, and by the time I made up my mind to get the ticket it was nearly time for me to leave, so I thought I’d give it to you as a Christmas surprise. So it was a bad idea. Now I know.”

  “‘In love with her’?” Annabel said. “You fell in love with me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “But why didn’t you say so?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you aren’t the only person who’s afraid to get hurt.”

  “I wouldn’t hurt you,” Annabel said. “Never.”

  “You already did, and you couldn’t help it.”

  “What a stupid thing,” she said sadly.

  “You know what you remind me of?” Zack said. “A story I read when I was a kid about a little boy named Epaminondas. He went to visit his aunt and she gave him a cake to bring home to his mother. He held it tightly in his fist, and when he got home the cake was nothing but crumbs. So his mother said that was dumb, and the way you carry a cake is you wrap it in leaves and put it on top of your head. So, the next time he goes to his aunt, she gives him some butter; and he puts it on top of his head, and of course by the time he gets home it’s all melted. And his mother says, no, no, that’s not how you carry butter; butter you wrap in leaves and put it into the brook to cool it. So, the next time he goes to see his aunt she gives him a puppy dog …”

  “Oh, no!” Annabel said.

  “No, the dog doesn’t drown. But almost. And on and on, everything he does is what he was supposed to do to the thing before, and of course it’s the wrong thing to do. What I’m trying to say, Annabel, is I am not any of the men you knew before. I am the one you know now. So forget about all the others.”

  “I love you Zack,” Annabel said. How wonderful to be able to say it to him at last.

  “I love you, too,” Zack said. “And that’s only the easy part.”

  They spent all of Sunday together at home, but a great deal of the time he had to work on his notes for the following week. Annabel understood, and was happy just to be with him. In the late afternoon they swam in his pool—he was an excellent swimmer and she was just so-so—and then they made love. He took her out to dinner, to a dark, noisy little Italian restaurant, but they were home at nine and in bed by ten. She still had jet lag so she didn’t mind.

  “This is my life when I’m working,” he said. “But usually I don’t even go out to dinner.”

>   “This is most people’s lives when they’re working,” Annabel said.

  “Glamorous Hollywood.”

  He got up at five in the morning, but he let her sleep and arranged for one of the drivers to pick her up and bring her to the set at ten. They were shooting indoors; it was a bedroom, and everything was interesting to her because she had never seen it before. Most of all she liked the way Zack behaved with everyone, constantly moving around with that crackling intensity of his, and yet warm and almost paternal too. He took the actors aside and talked to them gently, in a low voice, and sent them back to do the scene again, and again. They had to do everything again and again, for different camera angles, and in between there were boring waits for setups. But Zack never stopped watching, moving, thinking.

  The star, Sarah Very, was smaller than Annabel had thought from seeing her on the screen, but she supposed most of them were. Emily’s daughter, Kit, was beautiful. Annabel tried to remember the way Emily had looked back at Radcliffe, and decided Kit looked a lot like she had, but better because the hair and makeup in those days had been so unflattering. Kit seemed very quiet and serious. During all those long waits she withdrew into her dressing room and shut the door, and when she was out on the set again she never joked around or even spoke to anyone unless she had to to be pleasant, as she did when Zack introduced her to Annabel. No small talk about Emma, nothing. A polite smile, a firm handshake, and nice to meet you, good-bye. She clutched her script the way a child clutches a security blanket, even though she knew all her lines perfectly, and at the end of the day she disappeared.

  “Want to see dailies?” Zack said to Annabel.

  “Sure.”

  They watched what had been filmed the day before, with some other people, in a small screening room with red velvet seats. Annabel had seen Sarah Very in several movies and knew how good she was, but she had never seen Kit. Kit was amazing. She was complex, vulnerable, and luminous.

  “I was right about the kid,” Zack said to one of the men. “She’s wonderful.”

  “And she’s been behaving herself,” the man said. “You know she’s pretty much of a nut in real life.”

  “This is real life,” Zack said calmly. “And if she acts like a nut I’ll kill her.”

  “I’m beginning to think those rumors were exaggerated anyway,” the man said.

  They didn’t get home until eight o’clock. Annabel helped Zack put together a light supper and they ate it in the kitchen. Someone had come in during the day and cleaned his house immaculately. After dinner he buried himself in his notes. They were in bed at ten. “I shouldn’t do this,” he said, beginning to kiss her. “I should be sleeping.”

  “I’m only going to be here a week.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m breaking my rule.”

  The next morning she insisted on getting up with him at five, to see everything he did, to be as excited and tired as he was, to live his entire day so she could understand it. But she already did. His creative work was the central fire of his life. That energy and enthusiasm was what she respected about him. She remembered Rusty, her ex-husband, who had been only a playboy, pretending to work, drinking at the country club instead, playing golf, having endless boozy lunches. The worst thing about their marriage had been that she had absolutely no respect for him at all. That, and the fact that he was a bore. Zack would never be a bore. And he didn’t want her to become one, just another of those wives who lunched and shopped, killing time. She had sold clothes to enough of them to know what their lives were like; Revenge Shoppers she called them; and she had no intention of becoming one.

  This would be fun for a week, living in Zack’s shadow, sitting in her chair at the edge of the set, moving quickly to get out of everyone’s way, but she couldn’t follow him around every day for the rest of her life. She needed to have things of her own, and they both knew it. When she got back to New York she had to go to Europe again for the collections. For the first time she was taking Maria with her, to teach her more about the business, leaving Pamela to manage the boutique on her own. Maria and Pamela were excited about their new responsibilities, and they were ready for them. There had to be some kind of compromise, Annabel thought, some way she could be with a man who lived on the opposite coast and whose work even took him to Europe for months at a time, without giving up her own life.

  Zack had fallen in love with her, and he liked her the way she was. He didn’t want to change her, nor have her change herself for him. And she loved him because he was exactly the person he already was. But she was so happy with him right now that she couldn’t think about the future anymore.

  The week went by so fast Annabel couldn’t bear it. She called Emily just to say hello, and to explain that she was passing through town very quickly. And then she had one more weekend alone with Zack, until she had to go to New York Sunday night on the Red Eye. On the plane she almost cried.

  When she was back in New York Zack called her every night, and when she went to Milan and Paris and London he called her there. In April Annabel went back to California to see him again, for another week.

  “When I finish shooting and start editing,” he said, “you’re really going to see a devoted lunatic.”

  “Devoted to me?” she said.

  “No, devoted to my little machine.”

  “Can I watch?”

  “Sure.”

  “Emma will be so jealous,” Annabel said. “She’d give her eye teeth to be hovering over your shoulder in the cutting room.”

  “She’d probably enjoy it more than you will too.”

  “We shall see,” Annabel said.

  “In our own funny way, though,” Zack said, “it’s still working out for us, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “Are you beginning to understand what I meant when I said that loving each other was only the easy part?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re still willing to give it time to see if it’s going to work?”

  “Of course I am,” Annabel said.

  “I’m glad.” They looked at each other. “And then,” he said, “we’ll have to figure out how.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  By the end of March Daphne and Michael knew they wanted to marry each other. For both of them it was very simple: they were in love, they made each other’s lives complete, they were happy now when before they had been simply marking time. Even though he knew all her flaws and scars he still thought she was perfect, his princess. Not in the way Richard had, denying that she had a right to be like other people, but in his own way because she was his princess. Perhaps Daphne was one of those women who was always destined to be someone’s Golden Girl. She preferred to think of herself as someone who had come through trouble and had survived. Michael thought of her as that too, and admired her and wanted to take care of her.

  And she wanted to take care of him. She wanted to meet his children, to win them over, to make them happy. She wanted her sons to like him and his children, to become a family again, or even the family they had never really been. She looked around her house and grounds, the places she had once loved before all the things had happened to ruin them for her, and now all she thought was that they were an obstacle that kept her away from Michael, and that she wished she lived in New York. She began to hate commuting, and the too-brief dinners with Michael that had to end with each of them going home separately, and Sunday nights after their weekends together, when he had to leave. She knew he hated it too.

  “This is silly,” he said one night. “Spending all our time in cars and trains when we could be together.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “We ought to get married.”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Daphne said.

  They decided that he would take her out to dinner with his children, and later, when her boys came home for their Easter holiday, they would all go out together. Daphne knew her sons would not be a problem. Whatever they thought (and how co
uld they not like this kind, charming, sweet man?) they would behave properly. And they still had their time with Richard. She wondered, however, how Michael’s children would feel about her being brought into their lives as some kind of replacement.

  She met him at his apartment for a drink. It was the first time she had been there, and as soon as she walked in Daphne felt the emptiness. It was like her house; the heart was gone, and everything was too still. The furniture was modern, quite different from hers, but it set off his collection of paintings very well. She liked them all. He had put out some little Japanese crackers in a crystal bowl on the coffee table, and gave her a glass of wine. Then his children came in, all dressed up. Cathy, fourteen, very pretty but very overweight, too fat really to look right in anything stylish, wearing a kind of smock thing. She had Michael’s blue eyes and aristocratic features hiding under the pudginess of her face. And Jeremy, twelve, a skinny, active-looking little kid with big dark eyes. He hadn’t started his real growth spurt yet, and when he did he would probably be even thinner, which would be worse for his sister.

  Michael introduced them to Daphne, they helped themselves to diet sodas—of course—and sat there looking at her. They knew she was important, Michael had told them, and they knew why she was there. She smiled. They smiled; Jeremy warily, Cathy merely politely and barely even that. Cathy looked longingly at the crackers, and then looked away. Daphne wished she had a cigarette. The children remained silent and she wished they were just shy. There was nothing to do but talk around them, so she and Michael did. He told her about his day, and she told him about hers. Then, because he’d just come home from his office, he asked the children about school. Then they went out to dinner.

  They went back to Woods, which was one of Michael’s favorite places because it was possible to get plain food, attractively presented. Cathy ordered the most fattening thing on the menu. Michael raised his eyebrows at her.