by Rona Jaffe
Actually, the last line was pure flattery. But if you weren’t nice to someone on his birthday, when would you be? Love, love, Olivia, she wrote, put the paper on cardboard in a big envelope, and mailed it to Houston, to Melissa.
It suddenly occurred to her how strange it was that her mother had never given a birthday party for her father, although she always gave one for herself and for Olivia. Was it because he was only a son-in-law, not a Miller, an outsider? Her father said giving a party for him would be silly. He had been cagey about his age for years, but when he was finally seventy-five he decided longevity was an asset and began bragging about it. But Lila had cancer by then, and probably she hadn’t been up to celebrating. Then, later, Grace had planned to give him an eighty-fifth birthday party, but he never made it; he got sick and then he died. At least he’d had a happy life in spite of everything. He always said how lucky he was.
Uncle David’s party was going to be in New York, at Nick and Lynne’s big new apartment, which most of them had not seen. Roger had agreed to go with such alacrity that you would think he had always gone to every family function as a matter of course. Luckily they didn’t have to worry about a present, because the family was all chipping in to send Uncle David on a cruise around the world. It had been Nick’s idea. Usually the family bought some large silver thing, but Nick believed his father should have some last adventures before it was too late, and Melissa agreed. Olivia wondered if Uncle David was still seeing his woman friend, and if he was going to take her along on the cruise and just not mention it. Did seventy-five-year-old people still have sex? She remembered when she was a kid talking to her cousins and discussing whether or not people in their forties still had sex. And then one afternoon in the office, when she was least thinking about Marc Delon, she looked up to see who her next appointment was with and there he stood with Spot.
She was a little embarrassed to see him in the flesh after her fantasies about him, but she smiled warmly. “Hello,” she said. “How nice to see you again. Is it time for Spot’s checkup already?”
“No,” he said. He seemed almost bashful.
She stroked Spot’s silky ears. “Well, how are you both doing?”
“I’m okay, but his paw hurts, I think.”
“Which one?”
Marc lifted Spot’s right front paw and Olivia inspected it thoroughly, looking at it, pressing it. “He’s not complaining,” she said.
“He was.”
“I don’t feel anything.” She tossed a dog biscuit and Spot bounded after it. “Not limping.”
Marc shrugged.
“When did you notice it?”
“Last week.”
“It seems to have gone away.”
“Well . . .”
“I could take an x-ray if you want, but I honestly think it’s unnecessary.” She looked down at Spot who was standing before her wagging his tail. “This is not a dog in distress.”
“I know,” Marc said mildly. He paused. “I have to make a confession. I really came here because I’ve been thinking about you and I didn’t have the nerve to call. Could we make a plan to have lunch together, or a drink?”
He was afraid, she thought, surprised and pleased. He didn’t forget after all. “Of course,” she said.
“What about this afternoon when you’re finished?”
Here is a man who makes plans to do things within the next moment, she thought, amused at how young he was. That afternoon was one of Roger’s gym days after work. Even if it weren’t, she was entitled to see a friend; it was harmless. “I could do that,” Olivia said.
“Should I come and get you, or should we meet?”
“I’ll meet you,” she said, and immediately felt guilty because she realized she was hiding him. But it wouldn’t be right to have him show up again; it would cause talk in the office. “Six o’clock. Tell me where.”
“The bar at the Carlyle?”
It was expensive, and he’d said he didn’t have much money. “Are we celebrating something?” she asked.
“No. I just wanted to go somewhere nice.”
How sweet; she was touched. “That would be lovely,” she said.
The Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle had playful murals on the walls, and little tables with bowls of nuts and baskets of homemade potato chips on them. It was flatteringly dim but bright enough so you wouldn’t go there if you were hiding. A pianist was playing rather loud background music. They both ordered white wine.
“Spindle Legs is in my book,” he said.
“Lila is immortal at last.”
“Cheers.” He raised his glass.
“To your success.” She raised her glass and touched his lightly as their eyes met and held.
“What have you been doing since I saw you?” he asked. He was still fixing her with his moonstone gaze, looking really interested, as if her life were something exotic and strange.
“Working,” she said lightly. “Trying to re-enter real life. You never sent me those articles you wrote.”
“I brought them,” Marc said. He looked away finally and took some tear sheets out of his briefcase. “Here. I hope you read them.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Too busy.”
“I’ll read them.”
“Good.”
She put the tear sheets into her handbag, and when she looked up at him he was staring at her again. “Why are you looking at me that way?” she asked, to make him stop. He made her feel like blushing, and that unnerved her.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said.
“Well, thank you.”
“Roger must tell you that all the time.”
“Of course he does.”
“He’s lucky.”
“Terribly lucky,” Olivia said with a little laugh. “Have you found a new girlfriend yet?”
“No.”
“You will.”
“Maybe.”
For some reason right now she didn’t want to think about his finding a new girlfriend so quickly. “You know what I never asked you?” she said. “Which books influenced you when you were a child?”
“I was spared gruesome fairy tales,” he said. “I liked adventure stories. The ones I felt comfortable with strangely enough had an adult figure in them, a kind of mentor. I always liked the idea of traveling through life with someone who knew the terrain.”
And do you still? she thought. “Sort of like Star Wars,” she said.
“Sort of.”
“And what have you been doing since you got back from Paris?”
“Just my book. And thinking about you. I didn’t call because I felt stupid. I thought: What does she want with me? She has a life, a husband.”
Roger isn’t my husband, she thought, but she said nothing. He might as well have been. What did she want with this beautiful young man who apparently had a crush on her?
“Anyway . . .” Marc said.
“Anyway what?”
“Here I am.”
“So I see.”
“I was so overwhelmed by that story you told me,” he said. “I thought: Here is a woman who was told as a little girl that she had to stay home and give her mother everything she had, forever, or go out and be killed. But she went out bravely and made a life for herself. I admire you.”
“Thank you,” Olivia said. “My family still thinks I’m a little odd. Two divorces, unusual clothes.”
“I like your clothes.”
“Thank you. We do have a few other mavericks. I had two cousins who were stuntmen.”
“Stuntmen!” he said, pleased.
“Unfortunately they both died before their time.”
“I’m sorry.” He obviously assumed it had been in accidents, and she didn’t amplify. Now she remembered dating, it was all coming back to her—the revealing of in
teresting tidbits of information, the holding back of anything that sounded too neurotic, such as a history of family suicides.
“I had a cousin who was a ballerina,” he said. “She could have been famous, but she died, too.”
“Of what?”
“Anorexia.”
Suicide, Olivia thought. We do have something in common. “How tragic,” she said.
“I know. She never had a sense of her worth.”
“It’s easy to lose,” Olivia said.
“But you have it.”
“I try.”
“I’m trying, too,” Marc said. “At this stage of my life, still in the struggle, sometimes it’s difficult.”
“It’s supposed to be.”
“Well, I’ll be famous one day, and then I’ll come back and impress you.”
“You impress me now,” Olivia said.
“Do I?” He smiled wickedly. “Do you think we could fall in love?”
Only if I were completely crazy, she thought. “I’m taken,” she said gently.
“Just kidding.”
“I know,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe I’m just kidding,” he said. His eyes were innocent, his mouth turned up at the corners, he was adorable. She remembered Alys saying once, bitterly, that she was thinking of pretending to be married in order to attract a man, because married women were safe.
She looked at her watch. “I’ll have to go soon.”
“Would you like another glass of wine?”
“I think I’d better stay sober with you.”
“I’m flattered you think I’m so dangerous.”
“I’ll read your articles and call you,” she said. “Thank you for the drink.”
On the street he offered to hail a cab for her but she said she’d rather walk because it wasn’t far. His lips brushed her cheeks, soft and sensuous. “Thank you for seeing me,” he said, and then he was gone into a taxi, off to his evening. She walked away, toward home.
And then she realized that she was completely, unaccountably euphoric. What does that say for my sense of self-worth, she thought, that I need him to flirt with me to make me feel this way? And then she was sorry that he wasn’t there so she could say it to him. But of course it was just as well that he wasn’t and that she couldn’t.
She got home before Roger did, and began to prepare dinner. She remembered the softness of Marc’s lips on her face, and imagined what they would feel like on her mouth. When she closed her eyes he was there. If she had just turned her head, a little bit . . . It wouldn’t be sensible to say anything to Roger about her drink with Marc. She didn’t know what to say about it anyway. She would have to make it sound like it had been nothing, and that would ruin the fantasy. But of course that was all it was going to be.
She read Marc’s articles in bed because that was the only time she had to herself. “What are you reading?” Roger asked.
“Marc Delon was in the office today with his dog. He left me these. He wrote them.”
Lie number one, she thought. Is this how these things happen? And I didn’t even do anything with him.
“Any good?” Roger asked.
“Actually, yes.” They were essays mostly about feelings, social mores and what it was like to be a young man like him in the world today. One was about problems with a girlfriend he was living with, an affair that seemed doomed. She looked at the publication date and figured this was the one he had recently broken up with. Why had he given her this particular piece? He obviously wanted her to know him better, unless it was a favorite of his. She recognized the sadness of knowing that something that had been briefly radiant was over, that nothing was right anymore and all that was left was closure. She had felt that way herself in her series of ill-fated romances between husbands and before meeting Roger. It was interesting to read it from the man’s point of view.
She remembered the cleaning woman who had worked for her years ago, who had formerly worked for her family. They had been looking for a way to get rid of her, and offering her to Olivia as a favor was a good excuse. The cleaning woman was a friend of the woman who worked for Uncle David and Aunt Hedy. “Your family is saying bad things about you,” she reported, having heard the household gossip from her friend. “She keeps telling him that you’re a slut. He tries to defend you but . . .” The she was Hedy, the he Uncle David. Olivia had been deeply hurt.
“Tell her it’s very painful being a slut,” she had said cheerfully, and the cleaning woman had laughed. She knew how hard single life was, even if Hedy had forgotten.
Olivia waited two days to call Marc. “I read your articles,” she said. “You’re very talented. I loved them.”
“Thank you.”
“Some of the things you said reminded me of myself.”
“Really?”
“Especially the one about how hard it is to go on being with someone when you both know you’ve made a mistake. I mean—not Roger, of course. I’m talking about the past.”
“Your two marriages.”
“And a few other errors.”
“But I don’t like being alone either,” Marc said. “Did you?”
“No. But I was good at it.”
“I’m not even very good at it, unless I’m with someone. Then I love my private time. I like to go off by myself and write, or just think.”
“The comforting framework,” Olivia said, remembering Mandelay.
“Yes, exactly.”
“You must need these tear sheets back.”
“I do. We could have a drink together next week and you could give them to me then.”
She was glad he hadn’t said she could just mail them, but she hadn’t expected him to. “All right.”
“Monday?”
“That would be fine.” Monday evening Roger would be at the gym. It seemed ironic that now she was using his former cheating hours to do something secret of her own. She refused to let herself feel guilty; it was only a drink in a public place.
“The Carlyle again, at six?” he said.
“All right.” Just don’t say It’s our place, she thought, or I’ll cancel.
“It’s our place,” Marc said ironically, and then he laughed.
She smiled. She had underestimated his charm. She didn’t intend to cancel.
22
UNCLE DAVID’S BIRTHDAY PARTY was on Saturday night. Nick and Lynne’s new apartment, which they had spent so long renovating, was a duplex, with a large, curving staircase, a wraparound terrace overlooking all of Central Park, a Lichtenstein, a Jim Dine and a Botero in the living room and three Warhols in the dining room, which had been set up with round tables and spindly gilt chairs for the party. All the other furniture was modern but very comfortable, and the painted walls were so shiny you could ice-skate on them. Everyone was very dressed up. The adults were walking around inspecting the new apartment, complimenting everything. The children were gathered in Amber’s room, which was actually a suite, waiting impatiently for turns to play her pinball machine. Next to Amber’s suite was another one, furnished but without any toys in it yet, waiting for the second child Nick and Lynne hoped to have someday.
While Nick and Lynne showed off their apartment, Melissa and Bill were showing off the Uncle David commemorative scrapbook, which was huge and reposed on the living room coffee table. A tuxedoed waiter brought around glasses of champagne and sparkling water, a maid passed hors d’oeuvres. Someone had been hired to play the piano, and cocktail music tinkled quietly behind the familiar voices as the Miller family gathered again. The cousins greeted each other with hugs and kisses. Uncle David was beaming.
Almost everyone was there: Uncle Seymour and Aunt Iris, Aunt Myra, Jenny and Paul, Taylor and Tim, Kenny and Pam, even Anna the Perfect and her husband, and a young man who look
ed oddly familiar until Olivia recognized him as Charlie the Perfect’s son Tony, there with his preppy-looking wife. There were also over a dozen older people, who were longtime friends of Uncle David’s.
“You have to come visit us,” Pam said warmly to Olivia and Roger. “We’re moving into our new house next month. It has lots of rooms for guests.”
And no unheated water bed, Olivia thought, remembering. Kenny has someone to take care of him now. “We’d love to,” she said, although she knew that was the last thing Roger would ever want to do on a vacation.
She wandered away and looked into Amber’s bedroom suite, admiring her little cousins. They all seemed so much older, bigger than when she had seen them last. They changed so fast. She felt a kind of sadness wash over her. I’m missing their lives, she thought. They were much too busy to notice her, and she went back to the living room to join the grown-ups.
“Those kids are something,” she said to Jenny, who was standing at the window gazing out at the view.
“I know,” Jenny said. “Did you see how tall Sam has gotten? All the girls at school are crazy about him.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“Two or three.” She preened. “Do we look like parents of a teenager?” She obviously expected Olivia to say no.
“No.”
“And Max is the next teenager coming up.”
The maid came by with her tray. “Sushi,” she said.
They took some. “Do you still eat this stuff?” Olivia asked Jenny in a whisper.
“Why?”
“You know, pollution.”