by Becky Aikman
What do people do in Connecticut, I wondered? I’d read Rick Moody and John Cheever. Mostly dinner parties and wife swapping. I wasn’t much of a cook, and I was nobody’s wife anymore. The thought still stung. I felt in my pocket for the return train schedule. 4:43, 5:43, 6:43. I could make any of ’em.
Stepping out at the beach, we ran into a woman Bob seemed to know. “Yikes, let’s go,” Bob said. He backtracked like a trapped animal as she picked up his scent. Too late. She zeroed in on him, bursting into noisy tears.
“This isn’t a good time, Cindy,” Bob said. Who was this woman? Ex-girlfriend? Ex-wife? Current girlfriend? Current wife? Her dog hurled itself up my leg, spackling me with sandy footprints.
“Uh, your … uh, dog …” I started to say. Cindy didn’t bat an eye my way, and neither did Bob. Whoever she was, she seemed to have more emotional claim on him than I did. I walked ahead while they spoke in addled stage whispers.
He caught up with me a minute later. “I’m so sorry about that,” he said, looking mortified. “She’s just a friend, going through a hard time. We used to walk our dogs together.”
Couldn’t he come up with a better excuse than that? I felt again for the schedule and cursed myself for not wearing a watch.
So I was really on edge when we finally crossed the threshold of his place, where the turf would be studded with quicksand and land mines. Rented in a rush during the divorce, the house was a knock-kneed former summer cottage, built in the 1920s, overlooking a sparkling stream. Inside, it was all white wainscoting and tilted pine floors, charming and cozy, with logs ablaze in a sandstone fireplace. There were fresh white roses in a vase on the coffee table and the luxurious scent of long-simmering veal wafting from the kitchen. Either it was the osso buco or Just-a-Friend had made it there ahead of us and boiled a bunny.
“This is Wink,” Bob said proudly, indicating an immobile mound of brown fur on the living room rug. Dog, I presumed. Asleep, or taxidermy project? I wasn’t much good with animals. I hesitated. Was I supposed to pet it? Was it rude to wake it up?
“What kind of dog is it?” I asked. Midsize, I guessed, taking in a long snout, arcing tail, and dainty white paws.
“We call him mixed breed to his face.”
A mutt, then. I felt a tug of sympathy.
Bob and I soon fell into the easy conversation we’d always enjoyed, and he popped a champagne cork, sheepishly licking the spillover off his knuckles. We worked our way into a pocket-sized kitchen as darkness fell outside. I supposed there were stars out there, so far from streetlit Brooklyn. Bob placed some votive candles on an antique farmhouse table, throwing a veil of intimacy over the room. It took on a golden glow that illuminated the weathered cabinets and floorboards. The setting should have put me at ease, but ease didn’t come easily to me anymore. Strange place, strange man, strange sensation. Strange.
There was no choice in that tiny space but to stand phone-booth close as he set to work on the risotto. I leaned against a counter next to the stove. The windows started steaming up, and his eyes turned guarded and edgy. Poor Bob. No cab to hail out here. It hit me that this situation might be even stranger for him than it was for me. Bob’s divorce had been followed by a three-year relationship with a woman who broke up with him by e-mail, then a lonely year or so after that. The woman on the beach probably fit in there somewhere. Divorce, misguided love affairs, and death. Between the two of us, I figured, we had the full range of romantic cataclysms pretty well covered.
All that trauma was very much there in the room, palpable as the scent of saffron and fennel, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that the most immediate thought in my head was more mundane: I hadn’t kissed another man in twenty-five years. I did the math while I was standing there.
Bob interrupted my calculations. “I’m sorry if I seem nervous tonight,” he said. “It’s just that I want everything to go well between us.”
The look again, and he said, “I just want you to know. Nothing is going to happen here tonight.”
I wanted to reassure him, and I spoke without thinking. “What I think about us,” I said in a hurried, level voice, “is that it’s just going to work.” I believed it, too, even as it burst from my mouth like a New Year’s Eve popper. I could almost hear the faint discharge, followed by the cascade of words as they fell to the ground like so much confetti.
Bob stopped stirring and put down the wooden spoon.
“Is it hard to make risotto?” I asked quickly. Very dopey question.
“It’s actually very simple,” Bob replied. “Like a soufflé. You just stir the ingredients, and it all comes together perfectly.”
Then without any fuss, he reached over, cupped my face in his hand, and kissed me. It was an admirably straightforward kiss, direct, right on the mouth, and not too long, without any accompanying fumbling or groping, but still somehow warm, very warm.
I’d like to say that everything fell into place afterward, as it does in a Trollope novel, when the lovers’ hands meet for the first time and their future together is settled. This wasn’t so simple. We lived far apart, he rooted by his daughter, I by work, friends, my life as I’d envisioned it. None of this was what we’d been led to expect; none of it felt at all familiar. None of it felt safe. Nevertheless, in the reverberations from that kiss, everything else drifted to the periphery. I opened my eyes and saw him clearly, and I thought, Ah … there you are.
chapter
TWENTY-ONE
just inside the front door of Tara’s place we nearly tripped over a good-sized cardboard box with red letters stamped on top: HANDLE WITH CARE.
“What’s in there?” Marcia demanded.
The withering look on Tara’s face revealed that the box was loaded with meaning, meaning she wasn’t willing to share, not before a high-octane cup of coffee. She elbowed away the question and led us toward the kitchen. It was six days before movers would cart everything out of the house, a graceful, tan-shingled beauty built in 1895 and restored to a magnificent polish by Tara over two decades. Her new home in Connecticut would save her a bundle, and it would also be cozier, more inviting, with the feel of a seaside cottage, whereas this house in suburban New York was substantial, a home for proper entertaining, for raising a proper family. I gawked at stately antiques as we passed through a formal dining room and parlor. We had come to help sort through things and pack, but the July day was too damn glorious, and Tara had told us to bring bathing suits for a side trip to the beach.
Alas, I saw, the house was neater than mine on my best day. Aside from the mystery box, everything remained in place. Couches, tables, rugs, pictures, even the smallest lamps and vases, stood impervious to the coming upheaval aside from a little round sticker on each. Red for the new house, yellow for a tag sale, blue for storage, and so on, with stickers for her daughters, for donations, on and on. Everywhere we turned, there was a colored label, except on that box in the entrance hall. It may have been the only possession the fate of which had yet to be sealed.
Tara limped ahead of us in flip-flops. She’d broken two toes on her left foot when she tried to move a dresser by herself and it fell on her. She broke one toe on the other foot when she tripped over a suitcase she’d left inside a bedroom door. Yet improbably, Tara was at her most glowing that morning, casual in a tunic and white linen capris, her eyes gleaming under dishabille, sun-streaked hair.
We reached the kitchen, and … What’s this? A man. And quite a nice-looking man at that.
We stopped short, and I bumped into Denise from behind. Tara turned to see our reaction, looking like a cat that had managed to swallow a handsome canary, despite three broken toes and a lifetime’s worth of stuff to pack.
“This is Will,” she said, entertained by our surprise. He stood up from a stool at the end of the kitchen island, facing one of the most dangerous hurdles in any new relationship: friends, and the meeting thereof.
“You’re a brave man, Will,” said Dawn.
He shrugged n
onchalantly. “I hear about all of you all the time. There isn’t much I don’t already know.”
Having just returned from the bakery with a breakfast stash, he gestured for us to join him as he sat back down and broke a blueberry muffin in two. Dude, Tara’s black Pekingese, scrambled greedily under his feet. The rest of us exchanged looks of approval. Here was a man who was comfortable nibbling gourmet baked goods in the company of his new girlfriend and her posse, whatever fevered speculation he might be setting off.
“Will is in touch with his feminine side,” Tara explained, gliding around us and pouring from a coffeepot, reading our thoughts. She leaned against his shoulder, and he wrapped a long arm comfortably around her waist. He’s in touch with a lot more than his feminine side, I thought.
Lesley was the only one missing that day, vacationing with one of her daughters, but I knew she’d be hungry for every detail. An imposing man, Will stood over six feet tall, tanned and clearly fit, his light hair mostly gray, a pleasing combination with the kind of blue-gray eyes you see on a Siamese cat. Barefoot, dressed in rumpled white linen shorts and a green-and-white striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he drew out each of us with the ease of Charlie Rose. Marcia, he discovered, would be moving into her new apartment in September; Denise was editing a novel set in a yoga studio; Dawn was worn out from a long drive with Adam to pick up their sons from camp. Most intriguing of all, Will commiserated with me about how Bob and I had managed to date while living a couple of hours apart, just about the distance that separated Will from Tara.
This man might as well have been marked with one of Tara’s red stickers—he was a keeper. The two of them obviously shared the same relaxed sociability. Their rapport was easy and fond. You know how you can tell when a couple is clicking—you see that they admire, not so much the beauty or the intelligence or the wit of each other, but the everyday quirks that make someone real and distinct, that might even annoy someone not in love. I could tell that Will felt that way about Tara. He never looked fonder than when she described her rigid color-coding system. “What can I say, I’m a control freak,” she said.
“I’m so pleased to hear you say that.”
We liked him immediately. We liked that Tara looked so happy, that the two of them had that Cupid and Psyche thing going on. Despite all the lifting she’d been up to, this was not the Tara we’d seen at our first meeting, the one who seemed to be carrying a heavy load. This Tara was lighthearted and loaded for fun.
“I’m not going to make you ladies pack,” she said. “I’m up for a day off, chilling at the beach with my friends.” But with Marcia moving soon and the rest of us anticipating dislocations of our own someday, she knew we’d want her wisdom on how to manage it. New lives, new places, fewer things.
Will padded behind with a coffee cup as Tara started a tour in the family room next to the kitchen.
“This is my room, the one I redid after David died,” Tara said, although it was evident without her saying a word. Whereas the rest of the house was elegant, with those formidable antiques, this space had the signature black cashmere touch, casual and simple, yet luxe and chic. I wanted to curl up in that room and luxuriate in the sunshine that poured through two walls of windows. The arrangement was offhand, mixing styles and periods and functions with careless zest.
“You put the table and the desk and the couch all in one room?” Marcia asked.
“Sure, why not?”
Before, Tara said, everything was darker. Now the color scheme played off shades of eggshell touched by a few bold, graphic accents of black. The new couch was a modern piece with a nod to Empire style, in white linen, with black and white pillows tossed along the length. That entire tableau had earned a red sticker, heading to the new home. The same with a bleached wood trestle dining table, surrounded by Parsons chairs slipcovered in linen the color of unbleached muslin. She had also red-stickered a filigreed antique birdcage and two Art Deco coffee tables made from mirrored glass. For Tara, clearly, a home wasn’t merely a place to live but a means of self-expression. She loved nothing more, she said, than finding a broken antique in a junk shop, spiffing it up, and making it her own.
“This was the room that held the most memories,” Tara said. “It was the one I … really needed to change.”
Since Tara had filed for divorce before David’s death, we knew there were heartbreaking associations in the house as well as treasured ones. We could only guess how they complicated the process of making that change. After all that had happened—the separation, the grown daughters moving out, and then David dying—Tara was left in the emptiest possible nest. The formal, family-sized house was all wrong for her now.
“You know, the process of transformation has happened much more here.” Tara touched a hand to her heart. “The house hadn’t caught up. It feels disjointed, suburban … weird.”
I recognized that this was true, but I was also sure that wrenching herself out of the family home had to be giving her fierce pangs, pangs that Tara wasn’t about to let us see. She steered us onto a south-facing porch that looked out onto a sloping lawn. Beyond a bank was a leafy wooded area, left in a natural state. Will shifted to the side and sat on the ground gazing into the trees, granting us some space as we circled Tara and she drew on a well of memories.
“I used to take out the saplings on this bank every spring. Then I would blanket it with wildflowers. I didn’t do it this year … I didn’t see the point.” She shrugged. She smiled, but we felt the force of her nostalgia. “Down below here is an old root cellar. It was the girls’ secret place.” She gestured farther out, toward the trees. “My youngest used to go on hunts down there … sometimes with her dad. She would come back with a checklist. Mommy, I saw one hippopotamus, two giraffes …”
The subject of children broke the reverie and led her to tell us about the buyers of the house, a young family of five. Tara had invited them over, gone over old blueprints with the parents, and toured the bedrooms with the kids. The little boy decided to place his stuffed animals on the same shelf Tara’s daughter had, a shelf built by Tara’s father.
“Holy shit, look!” I said. I had just spotted an animal sauntering through the woods below. It was a coyote, and a big one, practically, to my urban eye, the size of a Subaru. “Shit!” several of us yelped in unison.
Tara told us that a large coyote had attacked two children in town a week before. They weren’t seriously injured, but the community was on the alert. Now here was the possible culprit.
“This is too symbolic,” Denise said. “Danger lurking in the suburbs.”
Tara ran to call the police as the coyote slunk behind some heavy bushes and Will kept an eye on it. In a flash, a patrol car arrived, and a sharpshooter strode into the yard carrying a shiny rifle with a long scope. “We need to let them know that we are not a part of their food chain,” he said ominously.
Faced with this menacing man and his more menacing rifle, I found myself rooting for the coyote. But Tara had raised children there and felt no such hesitation. She pointed out the coyote’s last location and left Will to help the sniper with his mission. They didn’t find the coyote, but Tara learned that it met its fate a week later.
Meanwhile, back in her decorous parlor, she showed us that the only items marked to move with her were a zebra rug and some framed family photographs of David on a beach with the girls. “I will absolutely have a place for these in the new house,” Tara said. “All the happy memories.”
“Do you feel awkward about Will seeing them?” I asked.
“I never talked to him about it. But he thinks it’s healthy that we … talk about David. It’s part of who my girls are … it’s part of who I am.”
Most everything else in the parlor was for sale, lots of dark wood end tables and stout upholstered chairs. “That’s not me anymore,” Tara said. “None of these things would look right in the new house.” Her attitude was brisk, unsentimental. This new Tara was shedding an old skin, becoming looser, fre
er, unmoored from the strictures applied to the wife of a more conservative man, but the transformation had demanded a series of tough decisions over the last two months. She had uncovered everything she owned from long-forgotten drawers and backs of closets, and every bit of it, from salad forks to scrapbooks, had been examined, appraised, and rated for its importance and its worth, every object a repository of memory, happy or sad, significant or banal. A whole life summed up in its things, each of them put into perspective and accorded its place in a new life.
Some decisions were easy. We came to a tiny study where a chintz sofa faced a fireplace. She chuckled. “This is the room where David would always say, ‘Let’s go have a drink in front of the fire,’ ” Tara said. “It really meant, let’s go discuss how Tara is spending too much money.” The recollection at this remove seemed to amuse more than rankle her. Most of the stickers in this room seemed to be yellow—sell.
Some decisions were more complex. David’s desk, in an office with hunter green walls, was a ponderous mahogany beast from the nineteenth century. I could imagine generations of owl-eyed men poring over ledgers at this desk. Practical? Hardly, but her daughters laid claim to it.
Finally, she took us to a corner of the basement behind the furnace. I wondered why, until Tara made a sweep of her arm around racks of clothing and plastic storage boxes. “This is the last of David’s stuff,” she said. “Clothes, sweaters, sports equipment. I asked the girls what they wanted.” One took his hunting jacket to remember their backyard safaris. Otherwise, they wanted some T-shirts and a couple of sweaters.
“The same thing happened with my kids,” Dawn said. “They only wanted Andries’s T-shirts.”