I hesitated for a second, then called the main switchboard. When the automated receptionist started ticking off everyone’s extension, I punched in Kelley Hamlin’s number. It rang twice before I slammed down the receiver. I wasn’t going to start checking up on him. I trusted him. If he said he was working, then he was working.
Obeying some ageless instinct, I took a long bubble bath. Too long. My fingers shriveled. I put on a classic black skirt and ivory silk blouse that he’d always liked. I stared at the naked face in the mirror, somewhat reassured that the woman reflected there still looked pretty good, hadn’t changed all that much. You’re in your prime, I told her. I reached for the makeup tray.
I had my mother to thank for the dark eyes and good skin. The straight nose and wide mouth came from my father. My hair was the problem. Why couldn’t I have gotten my mother’s hair, dark and shiny like an artist’s brush? Or my father’s—thick, blond, and straight as a Swedish sea captain’s? Instead I got hair like my father’s mother and sister—light reddish brown, thick and curly, completely unmanageable. I battled it now, smoothing the kinks out with a hot comb.
I chilled a bottle of his favorite Puligny-Montrachet. I put on the music he liked, the Brandenburg Concertos. And I waited.
I was sitting on the bed with a book and a glass of wine, doing more drinking than reading, when he appeared about eleven-thirty.
“Are you hungry? There’s some soup.”
He smiled politely. “No thanks. A couple of us were working on a pitch. We sent out for Chinese. You should hang up your skirt before it gets all wrinkled.” He eyed the bottle on the night table disapprovingly. “Don’t you think—”
Before he could finish, I refilled my glass with childish defiance, but he was already headed for the bathroom. I tossed aside the book, drank some more wine, riffled the pages of a magazine, listened to the water running in the bathroom. He came out, picked up his pillow. The sweet, clean smell of him wrung my heart.
“David …”
He turned, but not all the way around to face me. Like he was on his way to something important and I was detaining him. “Wyn, please. Don’t make it any harder than it has to be.”
“We could go to counseling.” I rolled the hem of the sheet between my fingers. “Do you know how long it’s been since we made love?”
He exhaled through his nose. “Things at the office are crazy. I’ve been working my ass off. I’ve got so much on my mind I can hardly sleep, and then I come home and you expect me to perform like a trained seal—”
“I don’t expect anything.” My voice cracked annoyingly. “I just miss how it used to be. I want you to hold me. It’s not just the sex. You don’t even touch me anymore.” I swallowed audibly. “Do you realize that?”
“Haven’t you thought about anything I said Friday?”
“I’m going to look for a job tomorrow.”
A frosty smile of approval. “Good idea.”
I closed the magazine in my lap. “But I’m not moving out of this house.”
The smile vanished. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, setting his jaw. He turned and walked out of the room, pillow tucked under his arm, like a little boy running away from home.
When I drew my legs up under me, the magazine flopped open. “Hottest Careers for Women in the Coming Decade.” I picked it up, scanned it hopefully. “Finance.” I can’t balance my own checkbook. “Teaching.” Been there, done that. “Police Work.” I don’t think so. “Construction.” Are they serious? “Child Care.” No way.
I drank some more wine and pondered the realities of returning to the workforce, then I closed the magazine and heaved it across the room. When I stood up to take off my skirt, my knees wobbled under me. I sat down heavily, dissolving against the pillows.
Time to get ready for bed. I wanted to lay out the suit and shoes for my interview tomorrow. And the purse. Jewelry. But my head felt large. Unwieldy. I’d close my eyes.
Just for a minute.
Three
My oma told me that the best friendships often start with a quarrel. She said there’s a closeness that comes from a good, healthy fight that you can’t get any other way, and I think it must be true. Look at CM and me. Our friendship started with a fistfight, and twenty-two years later it’s still going strong. The friendship, I mean.
The fight was about a boy. It seems ridiculous now, but at the time we were the two tallest girls in the third grade, and Michael Garrity—while neither attractive nor pleasant—was the only boy taller than we were.
After the playground monitor had escorted us to the office, with CM holding wet paper towels on her bloody nose, and our mothers were sequestered with the principal, we were left by ourselves in the hall to await sentencing. We turned to each other as if on cue, and the instant our eyes met, we started to laugh. We got a two-day suspension from school. Our parents grounded us for a month. On our first day of freedom, we went behind her garage and gouged ourselves with her dad’s rusty Boy Scout knife to become blood sisters.
She accepted a choreographer’s fellowship position with a dance company in Seattle over a year ago, and we haven’t seen each other since. But whenever we talk on the phone, it feels as if we’re picking up right where we left off only a day or two ago. She’s the one person I want to talk to now, but before I can call her, she calls me on Monday night. At the sound of her voice, my seething emotions attain critical mass and I start to bawl.
“Wyn?”
I blow my nose and keep blotting the tears that refuse to abate.
“What’s going on down there?”
“I don’t know. David is … We’re—I think we’re splitting up.”
As I’m pouring my heart out, I suddenly realize she’s laughing. Surprise stops my tears in their tracks.
“I’m sorry, Baby. I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that I was calling to tell you Neal moved out.” Now I’m laughing, too, albeit a bit hysterically. “I think we should fall back and regroup,” she says. “Why don’t you get your ass on a plane and come up here for a nice, long visit?”
The following Saturday, one of those blue-and-gold September afternoons, finds me on an Alaska Airlines flight heading for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. My mother’s reaction to my departure was predictable.
“Have you taken leave of your senses? This is exactly the wrong time for you to go away. You need to be there. Show him you love him. Cook dinner for him. Make your presence felt.”
The fact that he’s never home for dinner, doesn’t want to feel my presence—in fact, acts slightly surprised and annoyed when we pass each other in the hall, as if I’m a long-term houseguest who’s overstayed her welcome—none of this registers with my mother.
David’s unabashed enthusiasm was depressing. “I think it’s a really good idea, Wyn. I need to do some thinking. It’ll be good for me to be alone.”
The plane’s docking ritual seems lifted from a religious service, as in “Thank God we made it.” There’s a final lurch, lights blink, chimes sound. The pilgrims rise en masse, pressing forward through the jet way, straining toward that first breath of fresh air. I scan the crowded terminal for CM. She’s easy to spot, with her mass of auburn hair a good four inches above most other heads, but she’s already seen me.
“Wyn!” She runs up and gives me a big hug. “You look way too good for someone who’s just been dumped.”
Actually, she’s the one who looks great. But then she always does. CM—or Christine Mayle to the rest of the world—is the only woman I’ve ever known who even looks good the week before her period.
Analyze her features and she’s not classically beautiful. But at just under six feet tall, with creamy skin, green eyes, and long auburn hair, she doesn’t look like very many other women. Her taste in clothing is, frankly, weird—handmade this, ethnic that, strange color combinations. But somehow it all looks good when she puts it on, and she carries herself like the dancer that she is, striding rather than
walking. I always expect her to break into a tour jêté.
Her apartment is on the fifth floor of an old brick building at the top of Queen Anne Hill, and it’s very CM. Two bay windows frame sweeping views of the city and Mount Rainier and the ocean—”Elliott Bay,” she corrects me. It has built-in cabinets and a fireplace, crown molding, green-and-black tile in the kitchen. No water pressure, but tons of ambience.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a guest room.” We settle ourselves on her couch. “This thing is a Hide-A-Bed. I think it’s pretty comfortable.”
I cringe, thinking of my back.
“We’ve had worse,” I say, smiling. “Remember that place we rented in Laguna that summer?”
She laughs. “The closet with the adjoining sponge?”
I kick off my shoes and pull up my knees, resting my chin on them. “Tell me about Neal. I’m so embarrassed I just dumped all my toxic waste on you when you called. I didn’t even ask about him.”
“We made it to eighteen months, three weeks, three days. That’s our new personal best.” She shrugs philosophically. “But it was going downhill for a while before he left. I think it started when he lost out on a teaching job he was sure he had. He got in this downward spiral where he couldn’t work. He got very clingy and insecure. Then he started dropping hints about how it was my fault—”
“Your fault?”
“Yeah, you know. Like I pressured him to move up here when he really should have stayed in L.A. and worked.”
“You know he’ll come back. He always does.” It’s about the best I can do in terms of comforting.
“I don’t think so.” She lets out a weary sigh. “We’ve never lived together before. It was …”
Instead of finishing the sentence, she goes to the kitchen, comes back with a bottle of champagne and two juice glasses. After a solemn toast to the Amazons—our high school nickname—she says, “What do you think’s going on with David?”
I set down my glass and press my fingers into the ridge of bone above my eyes, where headaches are born. “I honestly don’t know.” The lump in my throat makes conversation difficult. “It hasn’t been good for a long time. I guess I was trying to avoid it, just hold it together till things magically got better.”
“Did he say why he’s so unhappy?”
“He said he felt trapped—not by me, of course. It’s marriage in general. Too confining. And he might want to change jobs. He doesn’t want his options limited. I think for the first time in his life, he’s looking for self-realization.”
She looks at me. “Sounds more like he’s looking to screw around.”
“Thanks, Mayle.”
“Sorry. That was a dumb thing to say. It’s just that I never knew David to have a philosophical thought in his pretty head.”
“He isn’t stupid.” My voice sounds stiff and hollow inside my head, the way it does when you have a bad cold.
“If he’d dump you, how bright can he be?” she says, indignant on my behalf.
I don’t say anything.
“Come on, hate his guts. You’ll feel better.”
I take another sip of champagne and study her bare feet, curled over the edge of the couch. God. Even her feet are beautiful. Strong, slender. Maroon-painted toenails.
“You know any lawyers?”
My stomach turns over. “We’re not talking about the big D. Yet. Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe if I just give him some space …”
She lets it hang there for a minute, and then says, “Well, if it does come to that, be sure you check around. Ask some of your rich-bitch friends. Preferably a female lawyer. I think the men all subconsciously identify with the husband. If you can’t find one you like, you should call my friend Jill Trimble. In Silver Lake. She divorced Roy a couple of years ago. Took his ass to the cleaners.”
“Could we talk about something else?”
She leans over to hug me. “I’m sorry, Baby. It just makes me furious that he’d do this to you.”
The sofa bed is like every other sofa bed in the world—lumpy and saggy. I dream strange, exhausting dreams about swimming or drowning, wake up, roll around, drift back to sleep, into another dream. Finally, at eight I get up, pull on my sweats, and sit in one of the bay windows, stare at the fog hovering over the water.
I left CM’s phone number on three message pads—in the kitchen, in David’s office, and in the bedroom. Just in case he gets an uncontrollable urge to hear my voice. I could call him right now. To let him know I got here okay. But Sunday’s his one morning to sleep late. He’d probably be pissed off if I woke him up.
I picture him sitting on the flagstone patio with the New York Times and his coffee. That’s what we do on Sundays when the weather’s good. In the spring, there’s the perfume of creamy white gardenias, wet from the sprinklers. On dry fall days, the pepper berries crunch underfoot, spike the air with their sharpness. He’d be all dressed, of course, but I’d be wearing his high school soccer jersey that I cut the sleeves out of, and my flip-flops. He used to tease me about sleeping in the jersey, said he felt like he was sleeping with some jock. I thought it looked kind of sexy. Maybe not.
CM wanders out, yawning. She looks at the rumpled bed. “You didn’t sleep, did you?”
“I was a little restless.”
“I heard you thrashing around once or twice. Is the couch awful?”
“It’s not that bad. I’m just having weird dreams.”
“Liar. You can sleep with me.” She dismisses my protest. “I’ve got a queen-size bed. It’ll be fine. Hey, in Laguna we did it in a double. Besides, since we’re having such a bad time with men, maybe we should become born-again lesbians.”
She insists on going out for breakfast. “There’s a great little bakery just down the hill. We can have a brisk walk, get coffee and scones, and read the paper. I have to go to a meeting this afternoon at the studio, so you’re on your own till dinner.”
“You have meetings on Sunday?”
“Not usually. Right now we’re working out an itinerary for a series of master classes at schools back east, so things are a little crazed.”
It’s nine by the time we leave the building, me bundled up in sweats, a windbreaker, Dodgers baseball cap, long scarf wrapped around my neck, velour gloves. CM, oblivious to the cold wind off the water, wears tights and a Seattle Mariners jersey.
I should have realized that her idea of a brisk walk just down the hill is my idea of a forced march, particularly when I haven’t had my coffee. We weave through a maze of streets, commercial and residential. Small shops, cafés, a few bars. Victorian houses, craftsman bungalows, Spanish/Moroccan stucco, New England saltbox. Some old, some new, in varying states of renovation and decay. Sprawling magnolia trees, velvet-green pines, a few magnificent old hardwoods. Gardens spilling over with flowers, neatly manicured lawns. One shabby cottage has a wooden sign stuck in the weed-infested ground. It says “We like the natural look.”
Half an hour later, we arrive at the block of squatty brick buildings that includes the Queen Street Bakery. By now, the sun has burned through the fog. I’ve removed the scarf and gloves, tied the windbreaker around my waist, and I’m still sweating like a prizefighter. The crowd of couples and families and kids and dogs spills out onto the sidewalk. One guy has a red-coated cat on a leash. I hear him tell someone it’s an Abyssinian.
CM points at a vacant table near the open French doors. “Better grab that. I’ll, get the food.”
I drop gratefully into a chair, disentangling my layers of clothing and looking around me. The place is laid out shotgun style; from the front you can see behind the counter to the serving station, past the backs of the big black ovens, straight through to the back door. The café part is full of mismatched tables and chairs, with bright cushions, artworks of wildly divergent styles and levels of expertise. There are plants everywhere—spider plant, wandering Jew, devil’s ivy—obviously chosen by some unrepentant flower child. But it’s the smell of the place that grabs
me—not just the food, but the space itself—old brick and sun on freshly mowed grass.
When I was growing up, my family always vacationed at Lake Tahoe, in the High Sierra, right where Nevada’s elbow pokes California in the ribs. We rented the same cabin every year, two weeks in the summer, a week at Christmas.
On Saturday mornings, my father and I would drive over to Truckee, a little town with a high concentration of Basque sheepherding families. There was a bakery there called Javier’s, and we always tried to get there just as the huge round loaves of sheepherder’s bread were coming out of the oven.
The owner of the place was named Jorge, and he and my father had a running joke about the nonexistent Javier and where he might be that morning. They would talk about the weather and the sheep and the fishing while I wandered around, eating cookies and watching the bakers in back. I could never get enough of the smell of that place—the bread, the strong coffee, the creaking, splintered wood floors—or the feel of the loaf, warm in my lap on the drive home.
The Queen Street Bakery has some of that same flavor about it.
CM sets down two mochas and an earthenware plate with two scones. “Don’t thank me, just leave a big tip.”
One bite of the scone makes me smile—golden brown and crisp on the outside, meltingly tender inside and not overly sweet, with just enough chewy nuggets of currant to provide counterpoint. Funny how the tiniest perfection can make you believe everything’s going to be all right.
When CM parks herself in a chair and crosses one long leg over the other, every male in the place between thirteen and eighty is checking her out, some surreptitiously, some not so. It’s always like that, no matter where we go. One look and their eyes keep drifting back to her like compass needles to magnetic north.
Bread Alone: A Novel Page 4