Dumping Billy

by Olivia Goldsmith

  “Hey! How about a little help here?” Billy asked, coming out of the kitchen again, this time with plates and flatware. “You set the table.” He went to the mantelpiece and took down two candlesticks, the candles in them stubby and of two different heights. “Spare no expense,” he said. “Candlelight. Paper napkins. The works.”

  Kate smiled and set the table. She fetched a wineglass for him and put out the salt and pepper. A matchbook from the bar lay on the coffee table, and she used a match to light the two black wicks. As she did, it occurred to her that the last time Billy had used these candles it might have been to dine—and sleep—with Bina. She stood absolutely still until the match burned down, almost to her fingernail. Then she dropped it, just the way she dropped the idea of Billy with Bina or anyone else, and moved away from the table.

  To distract herself, Kate looked around at all of the French volumes lined up neatly on Billy’s bookshelves. She reminded herself not to be too inquisitive, not to bring up the past or the future, but she couldn’t help being curious, and it seemed harmless enough to ask. “What’s with the French?” she called to him in the kitchen.

  Billy emerged with his mystery dish and began to fill her plate. “Oh. I like it. It’s not as rich a language as English, but it has subtleties that we lack.”

  Kate sat at the table and placed her napkin on her lap. “Did you learn it in school?” she asked, accepting her plate and eyeing its contents with uncertainty.

  “A little,” said Billy. He filled his own plate, then took a seat.

  Gingerly, Kate tasted the stew. It was delicious, the meat so tender it fell off the bone. She looked across at him and smiled.

  “Good?”

  “Very. Really.” She leaned back in her chair and smiled at him. “You must have been a terror growing up. A real class clown,” she said.

  He shook his head, his mouth full. He had to swallow before he could answer. “No. I didn’t even talk in class. I had a stutter so bad that I was really self-conscious. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

  Kate put down her fork and stared at him. She had almost forgotten his slight stammer. But stuttering, she knew, was almost impossible to cure completely, and many of the treatments had only a temporary effect. “How did you . . . when did you lose the . . .”

  “Oh, I went all through high school with it. But when I was a junior, I had a good French teacher, and I noticed that in French I didn’t stutter. It was strange, to be able to say whatever I wanted to without worrying about certain words and letters I always got stuck on.”

  “It must have been amazing.”

  “Yeah. I felt like I was being let out of a prison. Man, I learned every word I possibly could in French. I wanted to know how to say ‘dude’ in French.”

  “What is ‘dude’ in French?”

  “There’s not really an equivalent. Believe me, I looked. Senior year I really didn’t study anything else. And I didn’t care about the grade. I just wanted to be able to speak whenever I felt like it.”

  Kate was fascinated. “What happened then?” she asked, like a child being told a bedtime story.

  “My teacher introduced me to some of her French friends, and she helped me get into L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. I was supposed to be studying French history, but what I was really doing was reinventing myself. I felt like I was reborn. I wasn’t the kid who stuttered. I was the American who spoke French as well as any Parisian. Sometimes people I met wouldn’t believe I was American.”

  “And what happened to your stutter? In English, I mean?” Kate asked.

  Billy shrugged. “When I had to come back because of my father, it just seemed to be gone. Sometimes when I’m tired or under a lot of stress, I stammer a little bit.”

  Kate remembered his speech at the wedding. He had stammered a little then. “How do you control it?”

  “I just relax and it goes away.”

  “You never had speech therapy? No one ever tried to help when you were younger?”

  “Oh, there was some attempt in grammar school. You know, a speech therapist. She used to come and take me out of class. I was mortified.”

  “Didn’t your parents try to help? I mean, was there any other—”

  “Well, both of them were very concerned. Every time there was an article about stuttering with some new cure, they got excited. But it was expensive and nothing really worked for long, and by the time I got to junior high I just told them to forget it.”

  “And you found a way to cure it yourself,” Kate said. His resourcefulness amazed her.

  “Well, I kind of fell into it, didn’t I? I shouldn’t get full credit. I just wasn’t so stupid that I ignored the possibility of change.”

  “And what did you study in Paris?”

  “Girls. I mean, for the first time I could talk to them. I also studied cheap train tickets. I got to Berlin and Bruges and Bologna for about a dime.”

  “Only places that began with Bs?” Kate asked with a smile.

  Billy stared at her. “B was the letter I had the most trouble with,” he said. “I wonder if that was just a coincidence.”

  Kate shrugged. “Jung would say no,” she told him, “but I’m not sure.”

  “What did Jung say about repetition compulsions?” Billy teased, and Kate didn’t know if she should laugh or cry. But she didn’t have to do either, because he rose and cupped one hand around her neck, then combed his fingers through her hair. “I have ice cream,” he told her, “but I can think of a much more delicious dessert.” Kate smiled up at him.

  Chapter Forty

  The afternoon was lovely, warm in the sun but cool in the shade of the buildings, with a breeze that kept the slightly humid city air from being uncomfortable. “Let’s take a walk,” Billy suggested. “I’ll show you some parts of Brooklyn you might not know.”

  Luckily, Kate had worn her Nikes and felt energetic. “I’m sorry that we can’t spend the night together this Saturday,” Billy told her as they left his apartment. “I’m always on watch during bachelor parties.”

  Kate nodded. Billy seemed completely accepting of Bina’s nuptials. Had their relationship meant absolutely nothing to him? She shivered, though the weather was perfect. Surely what she felt for him was not unrequited.

  Always sensitive to her movements, Billy put his arm around her. “Yeah,” he said, “those bachelor parties make me shiver, too, but I just close my eyes and think of England.”

  Kate hadn’t even considered the kind of raunchy goings-on that were typical. She didn’t want to ask if Jack would have lap dancers or strippers or even worse. The sun and the cloudless sky were so lovely that she decided to put the whole idea out of her mind and do her best to live in the present. The present was perfect.

  Billy took her hand, and although it was sentimental and wrong of her, Kate felt protected and loved just because he cradled her hand so safely in his own.

  “This is Windsor Park,” he said as they turned a corner and walked along a block of small houses, each with a garden in front of it. “Mostly Italian. Cops. Plumbers. A nice family neighborhood, but the yuppies are moving in from the north.”

  Kate enjoyed the gardens, some of which were planted with so many colorful flowers that they were almost in bad taste. In some front yards, as if the flowers weren’t enough, stood garden statues of everything from Bambi to the Blessed Virgin. They walked past a big Catholic high school and crossed a walkway over the BQE.

  “This is the edge of Park Slope,” Billy told her. “You can’t touch a house here for less than eight hundred thousand dollars anymore.”

  Kate looked from side to side at the brownstones and brick facades. Billy pointed to one where, unlike the others, the paint was peeling off the front door and the windows were old metal casements instead of the elegant flat expanses on the other houses. “You can always tell a holdout from the old days,” he said. “The old lady who owns that place probably hasn’t painted her kitchen in a decade.”

  T
hey came to a corner where a tavern had set a few tables outside. “Not quite a café yet,” Billy said with a smile. “Wanna drink?”

  Kate nodded. They shared a beer and sat on a bench, watching women with strollers and kids with bikes and dads move past them. “So you drink?” Kate asked, though it was now obvious that he sometimes did. She had feared he might be a sober alcoholic and not drink at all. Or a control freak like Michael.

  “My father told me there were two kinds of people not to trust: the ones who drank too much and the ones who didn’t drink at all.” He stood up. “You ready to continue?” he asked. Kate stood and took his hand.

  They walked for another half hour until they reached a building that was neither as perfect as the gentrified ones nor as run-down as the one he had pointed out to her. He stopped and searched in his pocket for a moment. “Come over here,” he said as he ran down the three steps and stood in the doorway. For a moment Kate thought he was only looking for a slightly private place to kiss her, but before she reached him he had inserted a key into the door. He took her hand and led her down the hallway of the brownstone, which had been divided into apartments. At the back he used another key to open another door. Inside there was an empty white room.

  “Come through this way,” he said, and led her across the gleaming wood floor to a back door.

  Once through it, Kate felt as if she had entered another world. It was a backyard garden, but what a garden. A small lawn was perfectly tended. It made Dr. McKay’s patch of grass look bald. Here and there, the lawn had bluestone placed in it, like islands in a green sea. They led in a lazy, curving path to a bower of trees that were in bloom. Behind them was a tiny pond surrounded by iris and fern. Kate could see goldfish darting under the lily pads and duckweed. Two chairs, their wood weathered to a silvery gray, sat beside the pool. Behind them, ivy crawled up the brick wall that divided the yard from whatever lay on the other side.

  But Kate didn’t care what was on the other side or anywhere else. It was the most serene, most beautifully groomed city garden she had ever seen. She didn’t want to be anywhere but here. She looked at Billy, who had stopped in the sunshine on the lawn and was watching her. She walked back to him. “How did you know about this place?” she asked.

  “It’s mine,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, when I was a kid we lived here. It was my grandmother’s house. She lived on the ground floor and we had the top. But my mother took care of the garden. She taught me, and then I started to like it.” He took her hand and led her to one of the chairs. “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “It’s breathtaking,” Kate told him. She thought of The Secret Garden, her favorite book when she was growing up. “You’ve kept it up? Do the people who own the house now—”

  “I own the house now,” Billy told her.

  “But you live—”

  “Yeah, I live over the bar because it’s convenient and it’s the right amount of space and it reminds me of my dad. I’ve been renting out this place, but I keep the bottom floor empty so that I get the garden. I renovated the house—I mean, not by myself, but with a carpenter friend and a plumber who used to work with my father. Anyway, it’s apartments now, but easy to turn back into a family house, maybe someday.”

  Kate sat, trying not to show her amazement.

  “Ça te plaît?” he asked.

  Did she like it? “Je l’adore,” she told him. “C’est un vrai paradis.” She didn’t want Billy to see just how impressed she was because it would embarrass her and possibly embarrass him. She was a psychologist and supposed to be aware of people’s psychological depths, but she had misjudged Billy at every step. The idea of him tending the grass, planting flowers, and raking leaves had never occurred to her. Why should it? She wasn’t yet sure about all that this garden revealed about Billy, but she could see how much it said to him. More important, she already knew what it meant to her. A man who could create and tend a garden like this was obviously very special. Why hadn’t she been able to see? Was it because he acted so casual, so carefree? But a garden like this took care and . . . diligence. It also took vision. She looked around again at the perfectly tended beauty. Kate caught her breath. A man with such tenderness as this could surely be a good father, husband, best friend.

  She dared to look at him. He shrugged. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” he said, quoting Voltaire. “I used to work here with my mother.”

  Billy had told her about his father’s death, but she hadn’t yet asked him questions about his mother’s. Now she did. “Pancreatic cancer,” Billy told her, and Kate winced. She knew it was a particularly ugly and painful death.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “When?”

  “Quite some time ago. The day before Thanksgiving. It still makes the holidays tough.”

  Kate nodded. Although she didn’t miss her father, and she was always included at the Horowitz table, she felt like the orphan she was from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. They sat for a while, both silent, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. Kate felt that by bringing her here, Billy had shown her more than his landscaping skills. She took his hand, and the two of them watched the fish move in golden darts under the surface of the water.

  Chapter Forty-one

  My God! These girls and showers! They are the cleanest people in the city of New York. Not to mention the ones with the most gifts.”

  Despite his sharp tongue, Brice was smiling. He sat between Elliot and Kate in the cab, a big, beautifully wrapped gift sitting on his lap. Kate wasn’t sure she could face everyone in Brooklyn, but Bina’s bridal shower couldn’t be missed.

  Elliot was silent. She knew he was angry at her, but there was nothing she could do. She thought of the Pascal line Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

  The story of Billy’s French lingered in Kate’s mind. She tried to imagine what a silent, humiliated young Billy Nolan had been like. She couldn’t. It was either a failure of imagination or too sad to visualize. Somehow, his history changed her view of him in the present. Instead of cocky and too self-assured, she saw his outgoing personality as a celebration of his freedom. It made her feel far more tender toward him, as if he needed protection. This was ridiculous, of course, since the days when he was a vulnerable child and adolescent were long over. Billy Nolan could certainly take care of himself, but despite her intentions to keep a lid on her feelings, she found herself feeling more and more for him.

  They were crowded in the back of the taxi, and Kate was relieved when the cab pulled up in front of the Horowitz house.

  Before they even reached the front door, it was flung open by Mrs. Horowitz. “Come on,” she called. “Hurry up or you’ll spoil the surprise.” Kate would never tell her that she had already “spoiled” the surprise by telling Bina in advance about the party. The two of them had made a pact long ago that they would never allow either one of them to show up badly dressed and be scared out of their wits by a “wonderful surprise.”

  Kate and the guys walked in and joined the others. There were kisses and hugs and introductions. Kate added her gift to the big, colorful pile already stacked on a card table. Then Mrs. Horowitz called out, “Sha! Sha! They’re coming!” Kate sighed while everyone else in the room seemed to suck in their breath so they could shout more loudly. Dr. Horowitz flung open the door and made way for Bina. Kate thought Bina did a miserable imitation of a surprised person, but no one seemed to notice. When Bina gave her a special look, Kate smiled at her.

  The party went through each of its traditional phases: the weren’t- you- surprised- yes- I- was part; the no- you- shouldn’t- have- this- wasn’t- necessary section; and the oh- let’s- eat- isn’t- this- delicious portion (and they were big portions). The party culminated in the traditional oohing and aahing over gifts. Kate knew she was watching an important female rite of passage, but she just wasn’t in the mood. She regretted giving up the day w
ith Billy, she was annoyed by all of the Horowitz extended family and their questions about when it was her turn, and she was bored by the chatter and old jokes, not to mention resentful of the way Brice and Elliot seemed to relish it all.

  Kate wondered why Bina kept throwing looks at her and hoped that Elliot hadn’t told her about what he was now referring to as the “Billy thing.” Several times Bina seemed to try to get next to Kate and talk to her, but Kate managed to slip away. Elliot wouldn’t—couldn’t—break the confidentiality of her private situation without her permission.

  When the cake was cut and being passed around, Kate could take no more and went into the bathroom to revive herself. She looked about as lousy as she felt. She put on some lipstick and a little blush, but it didn’t seem to do much. She decided it didn’t matter. She had been so happy for the past few weeks that her discomfort seemed especially painful. Why was seeing her friends such an onerous task? She thought about it for a little while. Kate believed she wasn’t like her friends. She had a career and loved her work. She hadn’t been out looking for a husband from the time she was twenty. She didn’t feel as if she needed a man to protect her or to support her. But somehow, because of breaking up with Michael or seeing Steven or because of this . . . thing with Billy Nolan, she felt as insecure and lonely as she used to feel back in high school.

  Since her talk with Elliot, she had felt more and more doubt. Somehow, being here with Bina and all her married Brooklyn friends made it seem more unlikely that she would ever get to share their experience of this kind of group celebration. Billy wasn’t “a safe bet.” He was not the kind of man women got to marry or men threw bachelor parties for. Kate imagined his whole life had been a kind of bachelor party, and Elliot was right: There was no reason for her to think that would change. She began to feel extremely sorry for herself and realized it was best to leave the bathroom now before the tears set in.