Second Time Around
Page 23
“There is nothing that makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.”
—Francis Bacon, Essays
Arden and I were supposed to get married.” Jeff Thuesen sat across the table from Jamie. He watched her with unnerving intensity, seemingly oblivious to the pub’s lunchtime bustle. Since he’d spent his morning conducting job interviews on campus, he was all buttoned up in a well-cut dark suit and a subtly patterned silk tie. He and Arden had made a great-looking couple with their dark hair and classic features and Park Avenue dress sense. Today, his conservative formality had the effect of making Jamie feel as though she were being interrogated by a high-ranking government official. “She knew it and I knew it.”
“Oh boy.” Jamie ran her thumbnail along the dull edge of her butter knife. She was wearing a suit, too, but hers was a shapeless black poly-blend atrocity she’d bought without trying on at a thrift store in North Hollywood. The jacket fit her in the bust but nowhere else. All the better, she figured, for blending into the background and letting the bride shine. On her way out the door, though, she’d broken down and accessorized with high-heeled patent leather Mary Jane pumps. Brooke had advised her to wear comfortable shoes to prevent bunions, but a girl had to draw the line somewhere. “I’m sorry you didn’t get married, Jeff, but what does that have to do with me?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
Jamie accepted the laminated menu their server offered, then put it aside without even glancing at the text. “Listen, I’m going to level with you: My goal is to be out that door in thirty minutes or less. I just found out this morning that the tearoom we booked in Saratoga is shut down due to water damage, so we had to move the bridesmaids’ tea to the college president’s house, and I have about eight billion last-minute details to attend to.”
He inclined his head slightly. “Then I’ll get right to the point. Why did Arden break up with me?”
“How on earth would I know?” She stopped fidgeting and gave him her full attention. “Wait. Arden didn’t break up with you.”
“Yeah, she did. Believe me, I was there.”
She sat back in her chair. “You broke up with her. I know you did. We all know it.”
Now Jeff looked even more confused than Jamie felt. “Is that what she told you?”
“Yeah.” She tried to remember exactly what had transpired all those years ago. “I think so. I mean, she must have said … Look, all I know is, people don’t spend days at a time sobbing in bed and blowing off exams if they’re the ones doing the dumping. She was devastated. I never saw her so upset about anything before or since that breakup.”
He took off his suit jacket and loosened the knot of his necktie. “At least that clears up one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Why you and your infamous lit clique all despise me so much.”
“We don’t despise you.” Jamie paused. “Okay, fine, we hate your guts. But can you blame us? You broke our best friend’s heart.” She braced her forearms on the table and leaned forward. “You must have.”
He maintained eye contact. “I did not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Why do you think I came to her memorial service?”
“I don’t know. To be hateful?”
“I loved her,” he said with such conviction that Jamie finally believed him. “I was planning to propose at the end of senior year. Then she dumped me right before spring break, and to this day, I don’t know why. What I do know is that something happened between the two of you right around the time she decided she was done with me.”
Jamie schooled her expression into a stony poker face.
After a minute or two, Jeff gave up on waiting her out and asked, “What happened to her? How sick was she, and for how long?”
“She never told you?”
“She never spoke to me again after she told me she didn’t want to see me anymore.”
Jamie tried to remain as clinical as possible. “Arden was sick for a long time. I don’t understand all the medical intricacies, but Cait tried to break it down for us a few weeks after the funeral. Lupus can cause your blood to coagulate, so you always have to worry about clots forming. For the past five years, she kept telling us she was going to die of a stroke.” Jamie examined her hands and picked at her cuticle. “But then, randomly, a piece of a blood clot in her leg broke off and went to her lungs instead of her brain, so technically, she died of a pulmonary embolism.”
“What is that, exactly?”
Jamie took a slow, steadying breath. “I don’t know.”
“Was it painful?”
“I hope not. I try very hard not to think about it.” This clinical routine was not working. “I can tell you this, though: She was very calm and reflective about the whole thing. She had a much better perspective than the rest of us did.” She shook her head. “I’m explaining this wrong. It wasn’t like she was a martyr, she just … She was still funny, you know? She was still absolutely herself. It was like dealing with all that pain and stress pared her down to the most essential kernel of herself. The five of us, the ‘lit clique’”—Jamie grinned in spite of the tears stinging her eyes—“spent a week every summer at her family’s lake house, and every summer we picked up right where we left off. The dynamic was always the same.”
“She was something,” Jeff said with a small, private smile.
“Yes, she was.” Jamie swiped at her nose with the paper napkin. “She knew everything there was to know about me—the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly—and she loved me anyway.”
Another long pause, and then Jeff cleared his throat. “Which brings us back to the incident of senior year.”
“Everything brings me back to that ‘incident’ these days.” Jamie stared over his shoulder and addressed the beer sign on the far wall. “The short version is, I did something I should not have done and Arden covered for me.”
“Any chance I can hear the long version?”
“Fine. I did someone I should not have done.” She resumed picking at her cuticles. “Terrence Tait, if you must know.”
He couldn’t have looked more shocked if she’d jumped up on the table and started stripping. “President Tait?”
She kept talking in a clipped monotone. “I was stupid and pathetic when we got together, but after he broke up with me, I took stupid and pathetic to a whole new level. I wanted his wife to find out about us, so I snuck into his house and left a smoking gun, so to speak, right on the desk in his study: a pair of black panties with a note reading ‘Come hither to Henley House.’”
Jeff’s eyes bugged out. “Holy crap.”
“And his wife did find them, right in the middle of a trustee reception, and apparently, you could hear the shrieking all the way across campus. I wouldn’t know because I wasn’t on campus that night; I was busy getting drunk right here in this very bar.”
“President Tait got busted sleeping with a student and he got to keep his job?” Jeff’s mouth hung open. Jamie could see the glint of gold fillings in his back molars.
“He did not get busted,” she corrected. “He claimed that he was being harassed by a delusional student with a crush. So campus security was dispatched to Henley House to ask around, and I guess they started with Arden’s room. She knew I’d been seeing someone on the sly. Of course, when she saw a copy of the note, she recognized my handwriting and put two and two together. She figured I’d lose my scholarship if anyone found out the truth, so she swore to the security guy that she’d done it. She took the blame and let herself be known amongst all the administrators as the unhinged coed who went Fatal Attraction on the president. And since she corroborated his claim that nothing ever happened between them, the president got to keep his job, but I know for a fact people are still whispering about it.”
“You let her take the blame for all that?” Jeff looked appalled. “What kind of friend are you?”
“A bad friend. I know!” Jamie dropped her head i
nto her hands. “Believe me, I get it.”
“Why didn’t you come forward? How did you live with yourself?”
“I didn’t come forward because, when I finally sobered up and found out about all this, she physically restrained me. Disconnected the phone, blocked the doorway. She was shockingly strong for such a skinny girl.”
Jeff was having none of this. “But she couldn’t hold you hostage forever. Ultimately, it was your decision to take the easy way out.”
“Ultimately, yes, it was,” Jamie acknowledged. “First, I was a home-wrecking hussy, and then I was a coward. I let her talk me into it because I was so afraid and she was so vehement. Arden said her family had given so much money to the school over the years that she could get away with anything because her last name was Henley, and you know what? She was right. At the time, I thought she was being noble.”
“And now?”
Jamie sat back in her chair. “Now I think she was being even more self-destructive than I was.”
“But Arden wasn’t self-destructive at all,” Jeff protested. “Not the Arden I knew. Why would she act like that?”
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this,” Jamie replied. “And I’ll never know for sure, but maybe it was because of the lupus diagnosis. She didn’t tell us about it until she was halfway through law school, but she’d known for a while by then. Maybe she found out she was sick right around the time of the black-panty debacle. And then you broke up with her, and the downward spiral continued.”
“For the last time, I didn’t break up with her.”
“So you say. But if you didn’t, then this whole thing makes no sense. I thought you’d heard the gossip and dumped her because you thought she was, you know, trying to get with President Tait.”
“I never heard any gossip, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have believed it. Arden and President Tait?” He scoffed. “Give me a break.”
Jamie’s world shifted ever so slightly on its axis. “So it wasn’t my fault that you two broke up?”
“Not as far as I know. And why does it really matter who’s at fault at this point? It’s been ten years.”
“I’ll tell you why.” Jamie hesitated out of loyalty to Arden, but then decided that Jeff had earned her version of the truth by revealing his. “You got over her eventually, right? You’ve had other girlfriends since we graduated college?”
“Of course.”
“Not Arden. She never went out with another guy after that.”
He looked skeptical. “In ten years?”
“Not a single date. She never got over you, and it’s my fault. I ruined her one shot at romantic happiness because I couldn’t keep my underwear to myself.”
“But you didn’t ruin anything,” Jeff said. “Don’t you get it? It wasn’t me that she never got over. It was the diagnosis.”
Jamie shrugged. “We’ll never know for sure.”
“Knock it off. You just said she wasn’t a martyr, so you don’t get to be one, either.”
“Um, ouch.”
“When she broke up with me, she wouldn’t say why. She just said, ‘I can’t.’ I still remember that. And I asked what she meant, and she never gave me a straight answer. She said, ‘I don’t want you to waste your time.’” One corner of his mouth tugged up in a rueful smile. “The irony is, I can’t even tell you how much time I wasted, wondering what I did and why things didn’t work out. I got over it, but I always wondered. That’s why I braved the wrath and showed up at the memorial service. I needed to see her through to the end. And now I know. It wasn’t me, and it wasn’t another guy. It certainly wasn’t you.”
“Closure.” Jamie nodded. “It’s supposed to help you heal. And yet, I still feel like crap.”
“Go ahead and feel guilty for whatever else you want, but don’t feel guilty about me and Arden.” Jeff relaxed and perused the menu. “She and I had our own thing. Nothing you did could have changed that.”
Jamie chugged the contents of her glass and pushed back from the table. “Well, thanks for the ice water. I’d love to stay and catch up, but I’ve got to run.”
“I thought you had thirty minutes for lunch?”
She extracted the cream-colored envelope from her handbag. “I just remembered I have to make a quick stop on the way.”
I’d like to make a deposit, please.” Jamie handed the reissued check from Arden’s lawyer to the bank teller.
The teller glanced down at the deposit slip Jamie had filled out. (She had listed Henley House as her permanent residence, because, well, what else was she going to put?) “Do you have an account with us, Ms. Burton?”
“I do. Well, I did, anyway. At one of your branches in Los Angeles.”
Then the teller noticed the amount of the check and her whole demeanor changed. “Step right this way, please. One of our managers will be happy to complete all the necessary paperwork for you.”
“Should I come back later? I’m kind of in a hurry.”
“Don’t worry, Ms. Burton. We pride ourselves on expediting these administrative matters for our preferred customers.”
Ten minutes later, Jamie exited the bank with a deposit receipt in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other. She paused in the middle of the parking lot, shivering in her thin suit jacket and trying to avoid getting rock salt stains on her shoes. She flicked open her chrome lighter and rolled the notched metal spark wheel back and forth with her thumb, debating.
“Hey, any chance I can bum a smoke?” A college student sporting a battered backpack and a pierced eyebrow loped up to her.
Jamie shocked herself by handing over the whole pack. “Have ’em all.”
The kid’s eyes lit up like he’d just won the lottery. “Are you serious? Thanks, ma’am!” He seized the pack and strode away, obviously afraid she’d come to her senses and change her mind.
“Don’t thank me,” she called after him. “Those things’ll kill you.” She glanced down at her boxy black blazer and knee-length skirt. “And who the hell are you calling ‘ma’am’?”
Ninety minutes into the bridesmaids’ tea, Mrs. Richmond was clearly having the time of her life.
Maureen made the rounds of the president’s parlor, fluffing her hair and glad-handing guests and doling out professionally gift-wrapped boxes to the bridesmaids.
“Thank you so much for coming all this way. Are you having a good time? Can I get you anything?” She would fawn over each new arrival for a few moments and then, without fail, turn the topic of conversation to her daughter. “Doesn’t Sarah look beautiful? And just wait until you see her in her wedding gown. I broke down in tears at the final fitting last week. I’m so happy for her and Terry and I know her father would be, too.”
Jamie lost track of Sarah soon after the guests started trickling in, but when she ran back to the kitchen to grab some extra spoons, she found the bride holed up in the pantry with a trembling lower lip and a mascara-smudged tissue.
“Uh-oh. What’s the matter?” Jamie put her arm around Sarah. “Whatever the problem, I promise I’ll fix it.”
Sarah walked over to the doorway and nodded out toward the crowd in the parlor. “That necklace.”
“What necklace?”
“On that woman.”
Jamie followed Sarah’s gaze toward the president’s longtime administrative assistant, Linda. “What about it?”
“It’s …”
Jamie waited for her to elaborate, but Sarah took one last swipe at her eyes with the tissue and made a beeline for the slim, stylish older woman. Jamie stumbled as her shoe heel caught between the wide, weathered planks of the hardwood floor. “Wait up. I’m right behind you.”
“Hi.” Sarah glided up to Linda with a radiant smile and offered her right hand. “I’m Sarah Richmond. I’m—”
“I know exactly who you are, dear. We’ve been introduced, don’t you remember?” Linda clasped her hand over Sarah’s and squeezed. “The alumni mixer in Manhattan last May. I’m Linda.”
“All the wedding activities. I completely understand. And you’re just glowing, dear. You’ll be such a beautiful bride.”
Something about the way Linda kept repeating the word “dear” set off Jamie’s infallible drama detector.
“Thank you.” Sarah was still fixated on the pendant adorning the other woman’s throat: a tiny gold apple with an underlayer of white gold peeking through where a “bite” had been taken out. It was simultaneously subtle and sassy. “You know, I was just telling my wedding planner here how much I love your necklace.”
Linda raised her hand to her throat and preened. “How kind. I call it my Garden of Eden necklace.”
“It’s very unusual,” Sarah said with just a hint of an edge in her voice.
“Isn’t it?”
“Would you mind if I asked where you got it?”
“Oh, it was a Christmas gift.” Linda held her smile for one more beat, then lowered the boom. “From Terry.”
“Terry.” Sarah swallowed so hard, Jamie could hear it over the clinking dishware and female chatter. “My Terry?”
“Yes, Terry—pardon me, President Tait—does have excellent taste, doesn’t he?”
Sarah stared at her.
“He chose you, after all.”
“Oookay. You’ll have to excuse us, Linda.” Jamie stepped in between the two women like a ref at a boxing match. “The lovely bride-to-be needs a drink.”
“Forget a drink,” Sarah said as Jamie hauled her bodily across the room toward the catering table. “What I need is a cigarette.”
“Can’t help you there.”
“Don’t hold out on me! I know you smoke.”
“Smoked. Past tense. Sorry.” Jamie snapped her fingers at Anna. “Crumpets and Chardonnay, stat.”
Anna took her time walking over with a tray of doily-framed pastries. To Jamie, she said, “If you ever snap your fingers at me again, you’ll have a hook where your hand used to be.” To the bride, “May I offer you a petit four?”