by Jill Kargman
50
Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.
—Susan B. Anthony
After a post-dinner stroll home under the stars and another blissful night of curling up in Eden’s pillow-covered bed, the duo parted ways the next morning. Chase kissed her good-bye and hurried off to work.
“See you tonight.” He waved and she blew him a kiss.
Now that she was out of Otto’s business, she had the burden of having to figure out what to do with herself all day. She still had enough money from Otto, at least for now, and she wasn’t much of a shopper, so she faced the blank road of hours ahead of her like ticking lines on a highway, outstretched, infinite and loaded with exits. What to do? Ah, the problems of a lady of leisure.
Eden decided that she would spend the day at the Metropolitan Museum. To her own shock, she realized she hadn’t once been there since her move uptown, despite her proximity.
She bought herself a coffee at E*A*T and walked up the many steps of the majestic building at 1000 Fifth Avenue. After giving her donation and pinning that day’s bright orange MMA circular metal tag to her lapel, Eden gazed up at the awe-inspiring ceiling, overwhelmed by the scope and choices. There were so many different artistic avenues she could wander—Etruscan vases or French paintings? Dead shark or dead Egyptians? Something about the grandiose, magnificent building gave her chills; it made her feel so small, the scale and scope of the architecture, the history of art before her. In fact while the enormous campuslike museum held sculptural busts and portraits of pharaohs and presidents, it also displayed Eden. Her portrait hung in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, the modern arm of the museum; she had gone several times when the museum first acquired the piece, a grand, ethereal, haunting masterpiece of Otto’s from fifteen years back. She was sealed in, part of the canon. Like Dora Maar. Or Whistler’s mom. Or the dead shark.
Most people in Eden’s position would want to revisit their painting, to experience anew the thrill of being immortalized on such a spectacular skylit wall. But not her. The picture represented a time long ago lost. So she blithely decided to go in the opposite direction: toward the tombs.
She leaned over sarcophagi, looking at the gilded stenciling and imagining the lives of the people who lay beneath. They probably bit it by forty. Or if not, by her age, they’d certainly be the village elders. Ye olde wise one. She meandered on, admiring a lapis pendant, checking out a headless statue with huge boobs (some things never change), and scanning the hieroglyphs. Why were the people always drawn sideways? They could build huge fucking pyramids but couldn’t render humans without profiles?
Eden was happy to let her brain float to outer space as her eyes gazed at the myriad earthly treasures. Even the architecture itself was art. In the vast and serene Temple of Dendur, she walked along the gleaming, windowed wall, the muted light washing the mammoth but quiet room, as she watched kids throw coins in the shallow fountain and make whispered wishes. She smiled to herself watching the sweet-faced teachers hush the giggling kindergarteners on a field trip. As they gleefully tossed their shiny nickels, she felt a pang; she missed small children.
“Eden?!” a voice beside her asked with surprise. “Is that you, my dear?”
She turned to see a beautiful older woman, long graying hair pulled back in a chic bun, wearing a black dress and boots. “It’s Penelope Bennett! Do you remember me? Wes’s mother—my Lord, I haven’t seen you in twenty years, my girl, and you look exactly the same!”
“Oh my goodness!” Eden squealed, hugging her. “Of course I remember, YOU look the same! Gosh, how are you?”
“I’m fine, just terrific,” she said.
“What a coincidence running into you,” Eden marveled. “I was just recently thinking of Wes. It has been so long! And you really do look the same,” Eden squealed. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, I’m in from Memphis for a few weeks. I’m . . . settling Wes in, actually. He’s moving back from London.”
“Oh,” Eden said, surprised. “That’s great!”
Eden shivered, recalling a dark rainy night a couple years earlier, when Otto was missing in action, God knows where. She had pulled a huge charcoal cashmere sweater over her knees and found herself tinkering around on the computer, looking up Wes.
“So he’s been in London?” she asked, knowing damn well from Internet write-ups on his work that he had been there for years.
“Yes, yes! He’s been doing such great work there. He won several awards, in fact,” she said, beaming, then caught herself. “Ugh, sorry, am I the braggart mom? I’m just so proud of him, he’s really done beautiful designs.”
“Office buildings?” Eden asked.
“Well, yes, initially, but he actually stopped designing new buildings and now specializes in restorations of old ones,” Penelope explained. “He refashions old homes, dilapidated factories, schoolhouses. He totally revamps them and breathes new life into them. It’s painstaking work, but he has restored some incredible places.”
“That’s amazing. That’s exactly what he was meant to do, beyond his wildest dream,” Eden said, impressed. Wow, Wes was really doing it.
“So, now he’s launching his own firm in New York, specializing in that niche. He actually is doing a huge project in Red Hook and one on the Lower East Side and another Brooklyn condo building that used to be a chocolate factory during the Depression.”
“You must be really proud of him,” Eden guessed.
“We are. So proud, in case you couldn’t tell! But most of all, we’re so thrilled to have him back in the New World, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”
“Absolutely,” said Eden, her heart heavy, thinking of Cole. “I have a son, actually.”
“Oh, lovely.”
“Cole. He moved to California for college, and it’s hard,” Eden confessed. “I hate having him so far away.”
“Don’t I know it,” Penelope commiserated, noticing a somewhat sad flicker in Eden’s eye.
A beat went by as Eden gathered the courage to inquire further about Penelope’s son, whom she had once so adored.
“Does . . . Wes have kids?” Eden inquired carefully.
“No, no children, never married.”
“Really?” Eden blinked in mildly relieved surprise.
“He came close,” Penelope explained. “He lived with one woman, a very nice British girl, a surgeon, and he was thinking about proposing. They were in Florence and they strolled the whole day through with the ring in his pocket.”
“Why didn’t he do it?” Eden asked, trying to casually mask her curiosity.
“Well, it’s a long story, I suppose. . . .” Penelope caught sight of Eden’s badly masked inquisitive look. “But the long and short of it is . . . well . . . you.”
“Me?” Eden’s heart started to race. “How?”
“It’s a crazy story, actually,” Penelope said, shaking her head with a smile. “He took her to a museum he loved—that he had helped restore, actually—and he was planning on finally asking her there,” Penelope said. “And there they were, in the center of this huge room, and in walks the curator with a team of handymen. They were carrying one of your portraits that the museum had just acquired and was hanging up, right then and there!”
“No.” Eden was stunned.
“Wes is not one to take things as silly signs or anything like that, but he just knew that he couldn’t go through with it.”
“Oh gosh, I feel awful,” Eden confessed, putting a hand to her chest. “Does he hate me, Penelope?”
“Oh Lord, no, not at all! He’s so happy. He’s incredibly successful—he’s redone huge buildings in London, two in Hong Kong, and is jammed with projects and com
missions here now. It’s incredible.” Penelope tried to rein in her filial pride. “On the other hand, how are you doing?” Penelope asked Eden, patting her arm.
“I’m okay . . . ,” Eden said. “You know, turning forty soon, kind of strange how time goes by.”
Penelope sensed a muted pain in Eden’s green eyes.
The two women looked at each other.
“Eden, would you like to go sit in the café downstairs and get a cup of tea?”
Just what the doctor ordered. Eden exhaled.
“I would love it.”
The two women, reunited after two decades, walked to an intimate, sunlit dining area in the American Wing. At a cozy corner table they sat with their warm mugs, and Eden felt a strange comfort from being in Wes’s mom’s presence. She recalled how, on her visits, laden with groceries and various house gifts from sweet-smelling candles to curtains she’d sewn, Eden had thought, So this is what having a really doting mother feels like.
“You know I have to tell you, Penelope, I don’t know if you remember, but your visits to our old apartment really stuck with me. This might sound crazy, but I feel like in those two or three weekends you showed me how to be a mother to Cole, in a way. You were always so warm and affectionate and I . . . never had that.”
“You know, Eden, I always had such a wonderful feeling about you,” said Penelope. “I loved those visits. I knew there was something larger than life about you. You were special.”
Eden smiled with a pang.
“And I hate to say this,” Penelope continued, “but when I looked at the sparkle in my son’s eyes, I knew that you would smash his heart.”
“I’m so, so sorry,” Eden replied, starting to get nervous. She thought she would choke on her guilt. What she did to him, her abrupt good-bye, her scatterbrained apologies clouded by her own excitement of impending fame, made her sick with remorse. She felt a knot in her throat as she pictured Wes’s floppy brown hair in their chipping-plaster doorway, his blue eyes shining through his little gold glasses. “I just feel so awful, Penelope. I think in truth I have never forgiven myself.”
“No—don’t worry, sweetheart, please. You see, I didn’t finish. What I was going to say was, I knew, knew to the core of my soul, that instead of feeling sorry for Wes, I felt sorry for you.”
“Me?” Eden felt her tenuous link to her past growing clearer as her emotions welled.
“Even after you split and you went off and became famous, I still felt for you because I knew something that you didn’t: that you would regret it more than anything in the world.”
Eden blinked and wiped a tear from her eye. Penelope took her hand.
“Was I right?” Penelope gently asked.
“I’m so . . . confused, I—.” Eden felt more hot tears stream down her face. “My life has taken so many twists. So many things went according to plan, but then so many things were unexpected. Otto and I broke up last year. I’m happy but I’m also a bit lost, I suppose. He’s now with a woman who was my age when I met him. I think to myself, of course she is with him, how could I fault her? He can make her a star. But gosh, you are right, Penelope. I have had moments where I’ve looked back at that crossroads and dreamed of what that other path would have been like. I’m so sorry.” Eden put her hands under her eyes and washed away the streams of salty water.
“Dear, life is all about those crossroads. But just because you’ve moved on doesn’t mean you can’t go back to the past. Just take the next exit and double back . . . like I did.”
“How? What do you mean?”
“It’s never too late for anything,” Penelope said. “That’s how I got back together with Wes’s father.”
“Back together? Had you split up?”
“You never heard the story?” Penelope asked.
“All I knew was that Wes was conceived at Woodstock.”
“So you never knew our whole saga?”
“No,” Eden said, wiping the last of her tears as she shook her head. “Would you tell me?”
“How much time do you have?”
“All day,” Eden said blithely through her tears. “All week.”
51
You can be gorgeous at 20, charming at 40 and irresistible for the rest of your life.
—Coco Chanel
Wes Bennett, Eden’s first love, was indeed conceived in Bethel, New York, at the famed music festival. It was the summer of 1969, and during the opening chords of Jimi Hendrix’s legendary set, a slim, soft flower of a woman named Penelope meandered with a friend to sit with a group of shaggy, stoned, southern guys. Wes’s father, Wesley, was immediately struck by her, and by the concert’s end they were in the grass, moving on each other in a kaleidoscopic collage of acid, blaring guitar chords, and the fabulous perk of outdoor make-outs: the delicious contrast of chilly skin and warm mouths.
Wesley and Penelope held hands for three days straight, slept under the gleaming stars, and made love among the masses, but felt as if they were on a desert island. Dizzy in a swirling sea of colors and music, and each other, they shouted, “I love you,” over deafening metallic riffs and whispered it again into each other’s cold ears at night. Theirs was a generation about freedom and raising a fist to convention and institutions of all kind, including marriage. So both young lovers, though thoroughly smitten, assumed this glorious cometlike time together, burning and bright, would fizzle into the darkness of the past when amps were unplugged and the crowds parted. Still high from both acid and the opiate of the dreamiest sex of their lives, Penelope and Wesley scribbled phone numbers and hugged good-bye, each swept up in the tides of their friends and the harsh wind of sobriety. Slowly, both looking back over their shoulders, they moved like cattle away from each other. As Wesley met Penelope’s tearful gaze, he almost ran back to her, until she turned around to face the path ahead.
In the days that followed, both pressed rewind on the static-filled hazy film of their fleeting union, and the highs continued long after the pharms wore off. But when a rainstorm drenched Wesley’s skin, smearing the digits of Penelope’s 415 number, and when she misplaced Wesley’s ticket stub with his Tennessee address, the two were parted for what would probably be forever. So Penelope and Wesley were set adrift with only their memories of that fateful night.
And a little something else.
After the party of the decade came the ultimate party favor: that September, Penelope was coming out of a café on the Haight when a sudden tsunami of nausea engulfed her. Oh my God. Even before her friend Susan teased, “Whoa, Penny, you knocked up?” she knew. Shit.
Her well-to-do Pac Heights parents were, ahem, displeased. To say the least. Her Woodstock cross-country odyssey was a whim that they had frowned upon. And that was just for a few days. This would be for life. Penelope paced. She puked. She knew what she had to do.
She announced she would keep the baby; the impending stork flight caused shrieks of dismay from her parents. When her mother and father told her she could either say bye-bye baby or bye-bye inheritance, she instantly bid adieu to the dough, moved in with Susan, and seven months later gave birth to baby Wes. With no way to track his father’s whereabouts, and convinced he would be horrified even if she were able to contact him, she simply did what women have done forever: went at it alone as best she could.
Penelope poured all her love into her son. She and his god-mother, Susan, doted on him constantly, rearing a sensitive, kind, loving boy who chose cuddly animals over trucks, blocks over guns, hugging over hitting. Wes had the sweetest soul of anyone she had ever met. And by his second birthday, brown hair floppy and eyes ablaze with cheer, little Wes was the spitting image of his father, full of hope and promise, with a heart so big it must have been crowded in the tiny bones of his rib cage.
A few months later, Susan announced she had fallen in love. Her new boyfriend, Jonathan, had just moved to San Francisco from Washington, DC, where he had worked for “The Government” (translation: the CIA). Disenchanted, he had moved out
west to start a new life using his skills as a private investigator.
“Well, do I have a job for you,” Penelope said over a candlelit table of Napa wines and Susan’s vegetarian cooking. “Any chance you could help me find Wes’s daddy?”
“Absolutely,” Jonathan said, fist on the table. “I fucking hate deadbeat dads.”
“Oh no, no, no, it’s not like that.” Penelope laughed, catching Susan’s eye. “See, Wesley doesn’t even know he was born.”
52
Middle age is when you’ve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
—Anonymous
Chase asked Eden if she would accompany him to the opening night of the New York City Ballet. Le tout New York was there, gilded in their glittering gowns and jewels, reluctant tuxedo-wearing husbands in tow as society shutterbugs captured the affair, one of the most glamorous in the city.
While most dresses grazed the marble steps of the New York State Theater, Eden’s hem was blush-inducingly high.
“Is that Paris Hilton’s cousin?” one society matron sniffed within earshot of Chase. “Brooke Lydon must be beside herself!”
Chase, overhearing, kissed Eden’s hand and apologized. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “We can leave if you want.”
“Leave, are you nuts? This is beautiful. Plus, Allison made me swear not to think about what a couple of embalmed uptown hags think of me,” Eden said. “Her exact words were ‘these crusty matrons haven’t been laid in two decades, so who cares what they think?’ ”