The Most Wanted

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Well, that wasn’t possible.”

  “Right.”

  “Nothing had changed. I mean, we had a friendship that was fun, but it wasn’t intended to be a partnership. I didn’t want that with Lakin. We didn’t have . . .”

  “What? Shared values?”

  “No, we did have shared values. We still do.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, we didn’t have the makings of the lifelong conversation, and . . . well, this sounds ridiculous, but she didn’t want kids. And I do. More than one. So I knew that we could enjoy each other for a while. . . .”

  “But she had a kid, Charley. Your kid.”

  “She didn’t want to. She didn’t plan to—”

  “So far as you know.”

  “So far as I know. She’s a good mother, but that’s not the same thing as wanting it, having it be something that’s got to be part of your life no matter what. Which is more like how I feel.”

  “Are you in touch with the child?”

  “Anne,” said Charley, slowly setting down his chopsticks and pushing up his bandanna to reveal the band of white that neatly framed his gardener’s tan. “I love my daughter. I support my daughter. I visit my daughter. Because I didn’t have a lifelong relationship with her mother, at least of one kind, doesn’t mean I don’t want to have one with my daughter. I might have other children someday. I expect to. And I’ll want to raise them with a woman I love. But she will always be my firstborn.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Her name is Claude.”

  “Claude.”

  “It’s Claude. Because Lakin’s last name is Monet. You might think that sounds like a joke. Actually, I didn’t think it up myself, but I like it now.”

  As I got up, he reached out in a kind of courtly, other-century way and guided my elbow. Stuffed and restless, I felt hanging in the air something in need of an apology, and I made a stab at one, which Charley waved away. I found myself wondering what had really gone on between Charley and Lakin, and I didn’t mean their cheerful, dumb-sounding friendship.

  What I was thinking about was . . . the obvious.

  We didn’t talk during the rest of the ride, and I left for the office as soon as the tire of his truck kissed the curb in front of my house. The rest of the day turned out to be a real pen-chewer, in which nothing got done.

  After I described that lunch conversation to Rachael, who was threading her way through traffic while we talked on our respective cell phones, I decided to change the subject. I decided partly because her silence couldn’t be accounted for simply by the vagaries of cellular phones. She was thinking about something.

  “So anyhow, Rachie, part of why I’m not up there with you is the house. The repairs it needs before I can even camp in the living room are vast. They are titanic. They are immense.”

  “Colossal.”

  “Herculean.”

  “Brobdingnagian.”

  “The Patrick Ewing of remodeling.”

  “But everything’s big in Texas, Annie.”

  “Yes. Except my bank account. I have no money, honey.”

  “But you do have your cute carpenter. . . .”

  “Yup.”

  “Annie?” Rachael said suddenly, and in her tone was the unmistakable “Annie?” of our childhood, the sharp upward lilt that signaled a plate shift in one of our conversations, a new vein to be opened and mined. “Do you like him?”

  “Who? Charley?”

  “Yeah, him. I’m in my driveway now, Annie. Expect to hear the dulcet tones of your shrieking nephews momentarily. . . .”

  “Of course I like him. I’m allowing him to further destroy my already nearly entirely destroyed house.”

  “You sound like a TV news anchor. A house can neither be created nor destroyed entirely. Destroyed is entirely.”

  “I miss you.”

  “I miss you too. But listen, do you like him?”

  “You mean, like him? As in like to sleep with him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus, Rachael, he’s . . . he’s, like, twenty-nine or something. And he’s, like, this semiliterate longhair—”

  “He didn’t sound that way.”

  Involuntarily, I reached down beneath the silky pouch of my slacks. There was a pulse there, beating in my crotch. “You think I’m fooling around with the landscaper?”

  “I think you took up a lot of time telling me about a lunch with a guy who does work for you. You took up eleven minutes. . . .”

  “You timed it?”

  “I was curious. And furthermore, you told me about it in a girl-guy way—where you say, ‘Then he said and then I said and then he said . . .’ ”

  “Come on, Rachie. That was just local color.”

  “Really?”

  And then I asked her, “Rachie, do you ever think of Carlos?”

  She didn’t skip a beat. She didn’t make that phhht noise that signals “Get out of here!” even over the phone.

  She said, “I think of Carlos . . . well, not every day. Most days.”

  “And what do you think? When you think of him?”

  “Annie, why do you care all of a sudden?”

  “There’s this kid,” I said, and then I was telling her about Arley and about Dillon. And pretty soon I’d got back to my own apartment, too, and let myself in, still talking into my cell phone. Then we disconnected, but just long enough to get Diet Cokes and go to the bathroom—she in New Jersey, me in Texas—and settle down, Rachie still in her bathroom, the only place she could hide from her sons, me on our little half-moon balcony overlooking Summit School playground, where Chicano kids played shirt-and-skins in the cool evening, leaping like elongated demons in a shadow play against a fat mappler moon.

  “What I could see about him didn’t stop me from loving him,” Rachael said. “And you know, Annie, I could see everything. It was that none of it seemed so bad to me.”

  “He did bad things?”

  “But not to me.” I could hear her sigh, hear the dull rattle of ice in her glass. “You think of your life as overlapping circles. You are one circle yourself. Your kids are another. At different times in your life, like when they’re babies, their circle and your circle are almost . . . like a total eclipse of the moon. All the parts of your life touch all the parts of their lives. But with Carlos, there was only one small part of our circles that overlapped. We didn’t have a common background, or friends or school to talk about. We didn’t read the same books or see the same movies. It was only us. Only our love. Like a planet with air only we could breathe.”

  “But all that other stuff, all of that . . . everything else . . .”

  “In the end, sure, everything else is what won out. What is the Japanese parable? A fish may love a bird, but where would they build a house? But the way I was with him, it was real. It was a whole life. But it wasn’t one of those things you look back on after twenty years and ask, What was I thinking?”

  “Well, what were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t thinking, Annie. Maybe I was afraid of what I’d come up with. I only knew that when he . . . when he was with me, when he was really with me—well, you know, inside me—it was like there was no surface on my body that wasn’t him. It was like when I drew in breath, what I breathed in from him was no different from the breath already inside me. I smelled like him. When he moved his arm, I couldn’t tell if it was my arm—”

  “That’s sex, Rachie. That’s a sexual high, and it doesn’t last—”

  “No, it was more than that.”

  “What do you mean, more?”

  “Well, more. A connection that was bigger than sex and bigger than . . . being friends. It was a real bond. But we could only express that connection one way. Through sex. But it wasn’t all from sex. We didn’t have all those other ways that allow people to link up and connect, to make a three-dimensional relationship.”

  “Would you do it again?”

  She was quiet. She breathed in, long
and slow, then out again, not quite a sigh. I could hear my nephews yelling in the background, yelling at each other murderously, ferociously, as if what they were fighting over was the last morsel of food in the cave instead of what it probably was, something like the channel changer. “Now?”

  “Well, not necessarily now. But after.”

  “I could have, after. He called me a few times. Right after Don and I were married.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Well, he wasn’t in the Department of Linguistics at Oxford, Annie. But he wasn’t in San Quentin, either. He . . . he had this sort of dance bar with his uncle or his cousin or something. I remember the name of it was Sunset Alley. It was in Brooklyn, and one night I drove over there. . . .”

  “You saw him again.”

  “I didn’t go in.”

  “Why?”

  “I knew what would happen. I knew that even if he was bald, or even if his hair smelled like Kools, and even if he was a hood and wore a leather jacket, he would still be that black-eyed kid. And we would still do the same thing. But it would be a wrong thing now. Something I couldn’t blame on youth and hormones.”

  The moon had risen as Rachael and I talked, and it spread its light across my hands, coloring them ivory, graceful as polished bone. The silver of my right-hand ring, a cat’s eye from Tienda Corina, was a black smudge. I could have gotten up and turned on the lights, invited in the customary business and bustle of a Friday night, slid in a CD, warmed up some pasta. But I sat, as the air lightened and cooled out of day into night, quietly, as if I and my sister were physically side by side in the sun room of our parents’ apartment, our chairs drawn up to the window that looked down on the Mayflower Hotel, our feet wedged against the pane, coffee cups balanced on our stomachs. “The reason that I couldn’t be with Carlos when I grew up didn’t have anything to do with him or me, Annie,” Rachael told me then. “It had to do with . . . context. We didn’t have any context in the world. We’d have had to move to New Zealand or something. And even then . . . I live in my head, you know? Intellectual stuff matters to me. I would have wanted to make a living. I would have needed to.”

  “So all that does matter. It’s real. And it turned out to be more important than what you had with him.”

  “Not really.”

  “How can you say that, Rachie? It’s so . . . hopeless romantic coming from you.”

  “I really never put it to the test. But, Annie, I believe it’s true. It was like in West Side Story. We were right, and the world around us was wrong.”

  “Rachael, come on. I don’t think of you as having these big, melodramatic—”

  “They’re just human emotions, Annie.”

  “But they’re . . . well, they’re the kind of emotions that can end up destroying you. Except for this one lapse, you don’t do your life that way. Neither of us does. We’re sensible.”

  “This was sensible. It was doing what my mind and body, mixed together, told me was the right thing to do. It just didn’t match the rest of my life.”

  “Not even then?”

  “Well, even then, I knew how I was going to turn out to be.”

  “Sort of . . . conventional?”

  “Yeah.” She was quiet for a moment. “Sounds like a skin disease, doesn’t it?”

  I sighed. I didn’t know what to say. And then Rachael spoke again. “I just don’t want you to have the impression that I didn’t think about the way I got involved with Carlos, or that I wouldn’t have done it if I had thought about it. You know? In fact, Annie, you know what?”

  “No, what?”

  “For a long time, for a longer time than you would ever imagine, I didn’t have too much respect for the world. I felt that it would probably always be the kind of place where a boy who knew the things Carlos knew would never be allowed to be happy with a girl like me. I thought that was unfair. And, Annie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sometimes, I still do.”

  It was probably nine o’clock by the time I drove over to my house. I don’t know what I expected to do there; it was just too oppressive to sit around and think of Rachael and how much I missed her, and of Stuart hunkering down in some SoHo bar with our old friends, all of them whooping it up and not thinking about me. From the car phone, I called Arley’s house. The phone rang and rang. I could picture it where it sat, on the little red-painted hall table, ringing as if it were a live thing, shivering and summoning her. It was winter break, and she probably was out with Elena. I called Patty, remembering just before her phone rang that she had just left for New Jersey. Jeanine was spending the holidays with her parents in Key Biscayne—according to her, the only place that was more depressing to spend Christmas in than Texas.

  I heard the music the instant I turned off the engine, but I figured it was coming from someone’s TV, through an open window somewhere in the neighborhood. It was, after all, the night before Christmas Eve: families were gathering. And the music had that old-radio sound you associate with vintage movies. The closer I got to my door, however, the louder it got, and I realized it was coming from inside. Fear seized me, injecting a few seconds’ adrenaline spurt, until I recognized the song. My mother sang it. I could hear her: “Keep that breathless charm . . .” That was it: “The Way You Look Tonight.” Feeling like a fool, I knocked at the door. It was opened by the Ghost of Christmas Past—Charley, completely floured in plaster dust; even his hair was white.

  “Anne!” He reached self-consciously for a rag and began wiping off his hands and face. We hadn’t seen each other since lunch the previous week. “I didn’t think y’all were in town. I thought I could get that ceiling down if I put in a couple of hours. . . . I’ve been working twenty-four–seven over there at the historical center—”

  “It’s okay, Charley. I don’t care when you work here. I just didn’t go home like I planned to. Stuart went.”

  “Aww, Anne. That’s too bad.”

  “No, I’m okay. I just needed to . . . take care of some things around here. No big deal.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “It’s okay, Charley. I’m a big girl.”

  He eyed me. “Not so big.”

  “I’m mean I’m an old girl.”

  “How old?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “I reckon it’s a pretty easy one.”

  “I’m forty, Charley.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  I stepped inside, wishing I had brought a sweater. The place seemed to have conserved cold air within itself like a vault. It had to be warmer in Newfoundland. “Is there air-conditioning in here?” I asked Charley.

  “Not yet, Anne. Actually, we need to talk about that. The wiring just isn’t going to support the kind of current you’ll need for central air, so if you end up wanting it, it’s going to run a little more than we discussed. . . .”

  “You should have a T-shirt that says that, Charley. ‘That’s going to run a little more.’ Do you think you’ll ever tell me, ‘Hey, Anne, you’re going to be spending a little less than you thought’?”

  “It’ll be the first time in the history of construction.”

  “And anyhow, why does everybody say, ‘You don’t look it’? Like it was this big compliment. Why does everybody think the best thing is to look younger than your real age?”

  “I didn’t say how much younger you look.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, you look younger than forty. But not that much. Maybe thirty-seven. No gray hair or anything.”

  “Gee, thanks, Charley. What a nice way to put it.”

  “You started it.”

  “In fact, I’m thirty-nine. I’m thirty-nine until next month.”

  “I had a hunch.”

  “You did?”

  “Well, that night you and Stuart came to the house, you told him you wanted to buy it because of the address. . . .”

  “I was drunk.” I scanned the room—the chalky drifts of decons
tructed ceiling, sagging doorframes, wall cracks as long and deep as the Nile. “I wish I were drunk now.”

  “Do you want a beer?” He had a six-pack of Lone Star longnecks in a little cooler. I accepted one, cracking off the cap on the lip of the iron mail slot just inside the door.

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” Charley told me appreciatively.

  “Charley,” I asked him then, “what’s that music? It sounds like one of those old Victrolas.”

  “It is an old Victrola.” He led me back through the hall to what had once been the music room, where a vaulted ceiling of powder blue was frescoed with faded stars: Charley hoped to preserve it. The record player was in a polished cherrywood case. Charley had found it in someone’s trash, rewired and refinished it. Now he picked up 78s wherever he could find them. “I like the way it sounds. Not that it sounds good, you know? It sounds like it’s far away even when it’s right here.”

  “Like a train whistle.”

  “Like that.” He smiled at me, streaks of dust settling in the wide creases of his cheeks. “Want to hear another one? ‘The Blue Skirt Waltz.’ ” I didn’t know the song. “Old one. Maybe the twenties.”

  “How do you know those oldies?”

  “I was the son of two music teachers. That’s how I knew the old lady who owned this house. She was a piano teacher, too. Do you like to dance?” Charley asked.

  “I do. And what we do is, every Christmas Eve, we go dancing, my whole family. And Stuart’s family. Up at this big beautiful place on the top floor of the Carillon Hotel. They have all these real trees inside there, decorated, you know, and it smells so good. . . .”

  “It doesn’t offend you?”

  “What, Christmas trees?”

  “Yeah. Lots of Jews feel like it’s kind of shoved down everyone’s throat.”

  “I did when I was a kid. I thought we got cheated, really. Like we got the difficult holiday, Passover, where you had to wash the same set of dishes three times a day for a week. And they got all the pretty lights. Now, though, I actually like Christmas Eve, because we’re the only ones who don’t have to worry about baking cookies and buying a million presents. . . .”

  “Don’t have to have Santa Claus come.”