“Thanks,” Iris said to Ben when she had gone off. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did. I believe in your work. And I do want to get something for my mother.”
Iris stopped herself from protesting that he needn’t. “Only if you accept the friends and family discount,” she said.
“If I have to, I will. Thanks. I’m thinking about these earrings.” Ben pointed to a pair of gold pendant earrings, each set with a tiny peridot. “They’d look nice with that first necklace Mom bought from you.”
“They would,” Iris agreed. She wanted to say, “And please thank your mother for not hurling my work into the nearest ditch after what I did to her son.” But she didn’t. She went about completing the sale and handed the earrings to Bess to wrap.
“Dude, nice turnout.”
It was Alec, in his biggest puffy coat and dorkiest hat. Iris felt her cheeks flush as she looked from Ben to Alec and back again.
Bess cleared her throat dramatically. “Since Iris seems to have forgotten her manners, I’ll do the honors. Ben Tresch, this is Alec Todd. Alec, this is Ben.”
The two men shook hands, said, “Hey,” and “Nice to meet you.” And then, miraculously, Ben took his leave, claiming an appointment. Alec, looking a little disoriented, wandered off and found Marilyn.
“Well, that was interesting,” Bess said, when Alec was out of earshot.
“Oh? In what way?” Iris asked, pretending indifference.
“He didn’t have to show up, you know.”
“Who? Alec?”
“Iris, don’t be deliberately stupid. It’s not becoming.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I know. It was nice of him. He used to come to all of my shows.”
“Back when you were a couple.”
“Yes.”
“Hmmm.”
“What does that mean?”
Bess shrugged and walked off to speak with a new customer, leaving Iris to try and answer the question for herself.
Chapter 20
Saturday, the seventeenth of December, found Iris and Alec splurging on lunch at Petite Jacqueline at Longfellow Square. Iris had ordered the escargot and Alec had ordered the mussels. It seemed that Tricia had introduced him to the joys of shellfish.
“I guess maybe I should have told you,” Iris said when their food had arrived. “That old friend of mine, Ben. The guy you met at the open house yesterday.”
Alec frowned. “The ridiculously handsome one beside whom I felt like a troll. Yeah? What about him?”
“Well, he was more than just a friend. We were together for about six years.”
Alec put down his fork with a clatter. “Dude, you spent six years of your life with this guy and you didn’t even mention him to me once? What’s up with that?”
“I don’t know,” Iris said. It was a lie and it wasn’t. “I just . . . I don’t know.”
“Are you ashamed of him or something?” Alec asked, retrieving his fork. “Is he a nut job? He looked perfectly normal to me. But I might not be the best judge of normalcy.”
“God, no! He’s eminently sane.”
“Well, have you seen him again?” Alec asked. “I mean, after that first dinner Bess told me about? And your open house doesn’t count.”
Iris shrugged. “Yeah. A little. Well, maybe more than a little. We drove down to Portsmouth one afternoon to see a show at a gallery.”
“So you went on a date.”
“It wasn’t a date,” she protested.
“Then what was it?”
Iris thought about her answer. “It was an excursion.”
Alec rolled his eyes.
Iris felt annoyed. “Why do you think you know what’s best for me?” she demanded.
“Well, someone has to,” he countered. “You don’t seem to have much of a clue. Just think of me as the older brother you never had.”
“The obnoxious older brother.”
“I’ve been called worse. In fact, just this morning my neighbor, that guy in the apartment on my left, told me that I reminded him of—”
“Never mind.”
Alec wiped his mouth on his linen napkin. (Tricia seemed to have broken him of the habit of using his sleeve.) “Seriously, Iris,” he said. “You say absolutely nothing about someone you were with for six years? You make me look like the warm and fuzzy one. I’m a guy. You’re a girl. You’re supposed to be all, oooh, let’s get married and have babies. I’m supposed to be all, uh, what’s the rush and where’s the beer at?”
“Hilarious.” But Alec is right, Iris thought. Something has gone wrong with me.
“So, should I champion this guy’s cause?” Alec asked.
Iris’s eyes widened. “How do you know Ben has a cause? I mean, how do you know that he wants . . . that he wants to be with me?”
Alec shook his head in a pitying way. “Iris. Please. A single man doesn’t hang around a single woman just to kill time. Men are goal-oriented. They don’t do anything randomly. He wants you back.”
“First of all,” Iris argued, “he’s not hanging around me. Like I said, we’ve met accidentally a few times. And had dinner once. And we saw that show in Portsmouth, but that was work-related. Sort of. Besides, that’s ridiculous, that he’d want me back. I dumped him. And not very nicely, either.”
“So?” Alec laughed. “We men might not be all that bright in some ways, wanting women who aren’t good for us, but we make up for that weakness with persistence.”
“Are you saying that I’m not good for Ben?”
“I don’t know. Am I? Are you?”
Iris groaned. “You’re infuriating. And obnoxious.”
“Thank you. My mother tells me it’s a gift. She tells me she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t want to strangle me.”
“How does Tricia feel about this gift?” Iris asked, smiling in spite of herself.
“Interesting—she doesn’t seem to find me infuriating at all. Or obnoxious.”
“Oh.”
Alec’s expression brightened. “Did I tell you that her manager told her she was the best employee she had ever worked with?”
“No.”
“Well, she did. And Tricia knows the woman’s hoping to move to another store before long, one closer to her home, so . . .”
“So you could be dating a manager.”
“Dude, talk about hitting the jackpot. Managerial and culinary skills.”
They paid the bill soon after and parted outside the restaurant. Alec headed back to his office on Spring Street (computer guys didn’t take weekends off) and Iris walked back to her studio (neither did artists). And on the way down Congress Street, she sent up a prayer of thanks to a possible God for her infuriating, obnoxious, and caring friend.
Chapter 21
It was Sunday, December eighteenth, and Iris was in her studio, putting the finishing touches on several projects customers would be picking up during the week.
The building seemed peculiarly empty today, though maybe it was her mood that was creating the sense of isolation.
She had spent Saturday night alone in her apartment, trying to read a very good novel by one of her favorite authors, Charles Todd, but unable to focus for more than a page at a time. Her mind kept wandering and her heart kept racing, no matter how many deep and supposedly calming breaths she took. She had hardly slept at all and now, after three cups of black coffee, her nerves felt all jangly.
“Rats!” Her inattentiveness had caused her to knock over the final cardboard cup of coffee. Luckily, there had been only a splash of liquid inside and it had run onto a rag. “Go away,” she whispered to the voice in her head as she dumped the cup into the trash.
It was Alec. “He wants you back,” he was saying. “He wants you back.”
And in between Alec’s refrain, she heard Bess’s intense questioning. “Do you still love him?” “Why have you been punishing him?” And God, all those lines of poetry!
Iris moved the wet rag aside. Th
ere was no doubt in her mind that Bess and Alec were pushing her toward a renewed romantic relationship with Ben. They might deny that they were actually “pushing” her, but Iris could feel the pressure they were exerting and at moments it made her feel almost breathless.
It wasn’t as if the thought of rekindling a romance with Ben wasn’t appealing. If she could forget how their relationship had ended, if she could remove all past context, then . . . But of course, that was impossible. Which made a relationship with Ben impossible.
Iris picked up a pair of pliers and put them down again. God, she had been so happy with Ben! She didn’t deserve to be so happy ever again. Besides, she didn’t think she ever could be. She was almost certain that her capacity for joy had shriveled into a very tiny and possibly very broken vessel.
Anyway, what was she thinking? Ben hadn’t said anything about getting back together. There was no possibility of a relationship rising from the ashes of what she had burned, in spite of what Alec and Bess might think. Even if Ben did want her in his life . . . No. When he had touched her shoulder the day he had helped her with the fridge, the sense of fear that had flooded her had been too great.
The fear of his final rejection once he learned of her failure. The fear of his utter disdain. And if for some miraculous reason Ben didn’t condemn her for denying her mother her final wish, then there was the fear of her inability to love him the way he deserved to be loved. Not after all she had suffered, not after how she had changed.
Something came to her then, a realization. In a weird way she had been stringing Ben along much as she had strung Alec along, committing to neither of them, giving each man little or none of what was his due. With Alec, her motives had been fully conscious. But with Ben . . . What was she doing to the poor man? The longer she refused to engage with Ben, the longer his opinion of her might remain . . .
Oh, but that was all so crazy! Nothing made any sense!
Too much coffee, Iris thought. Too much stress.
She would turn to a new task, not a project for the Christmas rush, but one she had been putting off for some time. She would force herself to concentrate and maybe the change of project would calm her.
Iris attached a diamond-tipped drill bit to the flex shaft, gathered clamps, and set about to bore a hole in a fine ruby she had bought during the summer. She had in mind fixing a rose gold jump ring to the stone, and then stringing it on an antique rose gold chain she had found at a flea market.
She took a deep breath and began. She worked carefully, with purpose. The process was going well. The stone was lovely. And then—the ruby shattered.
“Damn!” she cried. “Oh, damn, damn, damn!”
The tears began to flow, tears of frustration, tears of self-pity, tears of sheer sadness. She felt so sorry for the poor stone that had shattered, sorry for Ben, and sorry also for herself. She was sorry for her mother, whose loving and creative life had been cut so short.
Iris leaned against the worktable. She was so, so tired of the life she had been living. How much emotional strain could a person endure before she simply gave up the fight to be part of the world? And what then? She would find herself becoming a recluse, someone who had lost all interest in the lives of others, someone so self-focused that she had become abhorrent to society.
“Calm down,” Iris murmured. Maybe it was time to give some serious consideration to moving on again. You could never entirely outrun your demons, of course, but a complete change of scene might confuse them enough to slow down their pursuit. She could find a place where Ben would not follow. . . .
Iris stood away from the worktable, dried her eyes, and carefully retrieved the fragments of the ruby. She wrapped them in soft paper, and locked them in the safe. She could probably salvage a bit of the original stone, but she didn’t have the energy right then to think of how it could be done.
For now, it would have to remain broken.
Chapter 22
It was Tuesday, the twentieth of December, and Iris was in her studio, shivering with more than cold. Ben would be arriving soon.
She had spent Monday in a state of extreme anxiety, especially after running into Ben in the Old Port. He had been coming out of a pottery shop on Fore Street and Iris had not stopped walking as she passed by, calling a half-inarticulate greeting. The sun had been low and blinding, which meant they were both wearing sunglasses. Iris was thankful she couldn’t see the look in Ben’s eyes as she hurried on. She was grateful he couldn’t see the look in hers. By any standard of conduct she had been rude.
Iris found that she was twisting her hands, an entirely atypical gesture. Last December, her life had held some degree of peace and security, but now, nothing felt calm and nothing felt safe, not even her own home. Ben had called her there that morning. He asked if he could come by to talk.
“About what?” Iris had asked, her grip on the phone painfully tight.
“About what we haven’t talked about yet,” Ben replied patiently.
“I don’t think . . .”
“Iris, please. You ran away from me yesterday as if I had the plague. This can’t go on.”
She had hesitated and Ben had pressed until finally, Iris had agreed to see him at the studio that afternoon.
Iris heard the elevator rumble to a stop, and then footsteps coming slowly down the hall. She moved behind the larger worktable, as if it could somehow be effective protection. And then, Ben was knocking on the open door and walking into the room. He looked tired and uncharacteristically disheveled, his scarf poorly tied, his hair uncombed.
“Maybe I should wait until after Christmas,” he said by way of greeting, “but I can’t. I’ve waited too long as it is.” He turned and closed the door of the studio. “I need to know what happened back then, after Bonnie’s death. I’ve lived with the uncertainty for three years now, Iris. I’m not sure how much more I can handle.”
Iris was robbed of speech. Her hands gripped the edge of the table.
Ben came farther into the room. “I’ve spent too many hours wondering,” he went on, his tone urgent, “trying to figure it all out. And I keep coming up with the assumption that your leaving the way you did had to have something to do with Bonnie’s death.”
Iris found her voice. “It had nothing to do with my mother’s death,” she shouted. “I told you that three years ago! Leave her out of this.”
“So, what then?” Ben pressed, unfazed by her tone. “Did I do something wrong? Did I say something hurtful? What?”
Iris looked down at her knuckles, white with tension. “I told you then,” she said carefully, as if repeating long rehearsed lines. “I just needed a change.”
“A change?” Ben laughed unpleasantly. “From what, being loved? I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now.”
“I don’t care. It’s the truth.”
“Your version of it,” Ben spat.
Iris raised her head. “You shouldn’t have come to Portland,” she said. “It was a mistake.”
“What? I should have continued to let you dictate the process of my life?”
“How have I been dictating your life?” Iris demanded, angry now. “I walked away. You were a free agent at that point.”
Ben rubbed his eyes before answering. “You really think that?” he asked, his tone both weary and darkly amused. “You really believe that the minute you left for Portland all emotional traces, all memories and influences went with you? You really believe you made a clean break? Oh, Iris. Is your memory that short? Is your mind that distorted?”
Iris wanted to answer but she couldn’t. She remembered Ben’s impassioned pleas, the long letters, the desperate voice mails. Of course she had not left behind a clean slate. Of course she had not forgotten!
“I knew I would be compelled to try one more time to confront you if I moved to Portland,” Ben went on. “The fact is, I shouldn’t have stopped pursuing you three years ago. But I respected you too much to hound you.” Ben laughed bitterly. “You know that old
cliché? If you really love someone, let her go. If she comes back to you, she was always yours. If not . . .”
Iris stood, unable to speak, unable to move.
“To think that all along I was trying to protect you,” Ben went on. “I knew your mother’s death and all those years of her illness had almost destroyed you. And ultimately I let concern for you almost destroy my own future. I even went so far as to get married to someone I barely knew in a hugely misguided effort to—to release you. But I can’t keep living this way anymore.”
And, Iris thought, neither can I. “You’re right,” she said, finally finding her voice again. “You should go now. You should live your own life and let me live mine.”
Ben looked at her, his bright blue eyes dark with emotion. “Iris,” he said, quietly. “Did you ever really love me?”
“No,” she answered, as quietly. “I didn’t.” It was a lie for Ben’s sake....
“I don’t believe you. But if you need to lie to me and to yourself, then . . .”
“Just go!” she cried. “Please! Stop tormenting me!”
“All right.” Ben raised his arms in a gesture of futility and let them fall against his sides. “I can’t believe I was naive enough to think that maybe someday we could be together again. I’m sorry, Iris. I won’t bother you again.”
He turned and strode to the door. He let it slam behind him.
Iris stood at the worktable. She had survived the long-awaited confrontation. She knew that she should feel released. She knew that she should also feel ashamed. But all she felt were the icy chains of calm and denial wrap themselves firmly around her.
Chapter 23
Iris sat in Bess’s living room on Wednesday afternoon, a big old volume of Grimms’ fairy tales on her lap. She stared down at the cover depiction of Rapunzel, prisoner in her tower, and felt weirdly calm. It was a state something like what she had experienced after her mother’s death. But unlike three years ago, this time she realized that she was horribly close to exploding.
“I have a confession to make,” she said, when Bess had taken a chair.
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