The Meryl Streep Movie Club
Page 16
In one of the trunks she found her old school records. Isabel flipped through the report cards and occasional tests or papers with an A that her mother had saved. There was a letter, a copy, from her mother to the guidance counselor dated fifteen years ago, in October.
I want to assure you that at heart, Isabel is a wonderful girl, with much compassion. I think she’s going through a difficult and unfortunately long phase of testing, herself and others, but I have no doubt my daughter will come out of it a stronger person for her experiences. Isabel is a gem, and once she’s able to sparkle, watch out, world.…
Isabel read the letter again, tears slipping down her cheeks. Her mother would give speeches sometimes, insist she believed in Isabel, knew she was capable of better, but Isabel had written it off as lies to get her to behave. Her mother had been her champion. Isabel folded the letter and put it in her pocket, then resumed the search for the diaries with less worry. Maybe what her mother wrote wouldn’t be so bad, after all.
But after forty-five minutes, no diaries. She carried up some treasures she’d found, a few dresses and a hat she was sure June would love, a painting Kat had done as a seven-year-old for Isabel’s parents, Kat’s aunt Allie and uncle Gabriel, that Isabel would like to put on her desk. The diaries weren’t in those trunks, Isabel was sure of it. But she was glad she’d looked harder for them, for Lolly and for herself.
Isabel had chosen Heartburn. Another affair movie, yes, but a very different take. One she could relate to. Meryl Streep, a New York food writer for a magazine, and Jack Nicholson, a Washington, DC, columnist, marry, despite how cynical both were about their first marriages. Meryl gave up her life in New York and moved to DC, only to discover Jack was having an affair with a socialite while she was pregnant with their second child—and that she was one of the last to know.
She wondered if Griffin would relate—too well. Given the big age difference between his children, there had to be a story there. She glanced at her watch. Just before nine. Rain sluiced against the windows, the kind of downpour that meant Griffin wouldn’t decide to take a walk instead.
“I love this movie,” Pearl said as she sat down on the sofa next to Lolly. “You wouldn’t think a movie about infidelity could be so funny and poignant.”
Lolly slid the DVD into the player. “That’s thanks to Nora Ephron. She wrote the screenplay based on her book. It’s supposed to be very autobiographical. The husband is the one who Dustin Hoffman played in—what’s that movie? About Watergate?”
“All the President’s Men. And also based on a true story,” Kat said, coming in with her gorgeous red velvet cupcakes. June was behind her with a tray of two big bowls of popcorn. “I’m the weirdo who actually likes to read the book after I see the movie version. I’m going to read Heartburn after we see this. I’ve never seen it or read it.”
Pearl set a cupcake on the coffee table. “I can lend it to you. I’m such a fan of Nora Ephron. And every time I see this movie, I totally get why Jack Nicholson was such a movie star. He’s so incredibly charming—for a while, anyway.”
“Oh, I forgot the iced tea,” Isabel said, heading into the kitchen for the pitcher and glasses. She took a peek up the stairs, hoping to see Griffin coming down. No sign of him. But just as she was coming back, Griffin was halfway down, looking so… sexy was the word. The classic tall, dark—and slightly disheveled. Even his hair was sexy.
“I’m not late, am I?” he asked. “Emmy woke up and it took me a while to get her back to sleep. I had to fumble my way through a song from The Little Mermaid twice before Alexa couldn’t bear another off-key moment and took over. Emmy was asleep halfway through her first go-around.”
Isabel smiled. How she would love to sing a small child to sleep. She led the way to the parlor. “I wish you could have a video of that—daddy singing his off-key lullaby to his baby girl. It’s just so sweet.”
“I sing like Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia! Have you ever seen that? I wouldn’t have, but Alexa was watching it one night and said I had to come watch with her. That doesn’t happen often.”
Isabel laughed. “Just a few days ago, actually. It’s Meryl Streep month at the Three Captains’. All Meryl all the time. I’m glad you’re joining us.”
“Me too. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie that didn’t star singing woodland creatures,” he said as they sat down next to each other in the high-backed chairs.
June smiled. “I know just what you mean.”
There were hellos and small talk and the passing of cupcakes and popcorn, and Kat ran to get herself and Griffin two bottles of beer.
“Is everyone here who’s coming?” Lolly asked with the remote control in her hand.
“I think so,” Kat said, handing Griffin a Shipyard beer. Another guest was sitting in Kat’s usual spot on the beanbag, a chatty twentysomething named Jillian who had checked in with her boyfriend, who was apparently playing Warcraft something or other on his laptop in the Bluebird Room.
Griffin was so close. Maybe an inch from Isabel. As the movie started, she was so aware of him, the side of his arm. The side of his thigh. His profile, strong and masculine. That hair. He smelled like soap. Ivory.
“Wow, I really love Meryl with brown hair,” June said. “She’s so beautiful. I just love her face.”
“Me too,” Kat said. “Her bones are so elegant. Even with that funny eighties-era hair and shoulder pads.”
Some serious shoulder pads, indeed, were on Meryl Streep’s fancy dress. She was at a wedding—and carrying on a staring type of flirtation with total stranger Jack Nicholson. Yadda yadda yadda, they were suddenly in bed, sharing a postmidnight snack of the spaghetti carbonara she’d whipped up for him. As they ate, sheets wrapped around them, Jack Nicholson said that when they got married, he wanted her to make spaghetti carbonara once a week.
Which reminded Isabel of Edward. When they were sixteen, just weeks after they met, Edward had said, “When we’re married, I’ll make you spaghetti every day.” They’d eaten a lot of spaghetti in those weeks and months after her parents died. It was the one thing Edward knew how to make, besides sandwiches. So he’d make her bowls of spaghetti with homemade sauce and they’d sit and swirl their spaghetti and talk about how things would be when they were married. Not only wouldn’t there be children, but there wouldn’t be any heartache at all, according to Edward. She didn’t hold out much hope for Meryl and Jack’s future.
“Whoa,” Griffin said. “When Meryl says she’s never getting married again, that marriage doesn’t work, that she doesn’t believe in it, and Jack says, ‘Me too,’ they should have just stopped right there. End of the movie. Cut.”
All eyes were on Griffin. Including Isabel’s.
“Sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t help myself.”
“I think everyone in this room agrees with you,” Lolly said.
Isabel wondered if she’d ever believe in marriage again.
“That can’t be right,” Kat said. “Forty percent of all second marriages end in divorce? I’d think people would choose so carefully the second time around that the percentage would be much lower.”
June reached for a handful of popcorn. “Or maybe they expect even more. Stomped on or whatever the first time, so they won’t take crap the next time. Or they get out quicker.”
Meryl and Jack’s marriage, second for them both, was going great, though. And they’d just had a baby.
A baby. Tears pricked the backs of Isabel’s eyes when Meryl told her editor at the magazine she wrote for, “You get born too. It’s almost like you expand.” Isabel imagined that was exactly how it was. She’d ask June about that later.
Kat was shaking her head. “How crazy is it that everyone’s talking about the fact that this Thelma socialite is having an affair with somebody’s husband, and no one knows who, and it turns out to be Jack Nicholson?”
June licked some icing off her cupcake. “I wish I understood what led people to cheat. I mean, I get it, sometimes. But in this case, in so many cases, it just makes no sense.”
Kat nodded. “Do you believe he’s reading off this list of words that define him in this stupid dinner-party game even after his affair walks by? How can he not add cheating liar? How can he not feel guilty?”
“Maybe some people compartmentalize,” Isabel said. “To make it okay for themselves. So they can go on living in their house with their spouse like everything is status quo or whatever.” Like Edward had done for months until he got caught. “But I still think a woman in Jack’s situation, a woman cheating, would throw down her list and run off crying.”
“My wife didn’t,” Griffin said. “Ex-wife.”
All eyes swung to Griffin.
“She didn’t feel guilty, I mean,” he said. “She felt right. Entitled to happiness. She fell in love and that overrode other feelings, loyalty to her marriage, family.”
Oh. He hadn’t cheated. He’d been cheated on. She wanted to watch him instead of the movie, but of course she couldn’t.
“It’s funny how she—Meryl Streep, I mean—just knew,” Griffin said, clearly wanting to change the subject back to the movie, “the minute the hairstylists started talking about an affair in their circle.”
Pearl shook her head—in agreement. “I have a feeling it’s like that a lot. My sister, God rest her soul, she just walked in the door one day and just knew, including that she was the last to know in her neighborhood. Do you think it works like that? That everyone knows but the wife?”
“I didn’t know,” Isabel whispered.
“Me either,” Griffin whispered back.
They glanced at each other, and Isabel was aware of everyone staring at them.
“Oh, God, I hate this part,” Lolly said. “When she finds the receipts from hotels and gifts, she knows, and she confronts him and asks him, ‘Do you love her?’ and he says he can’t do this right now.” She was looking out the dark window, and Isabel wondered what Lolly was thinking about, what she was remembering. Isabel doubted her uncle Ted had ever had an affair. He’d doted on Lolly—as much as Lolly would allow such a thing.
“Yeah, like it’s just all too much for poor him.” June rolled her eyes. “I liked his character so much until that—well, until you know he’s having an affair.”
“What’s so scary to me is how your life just changes. Just like that”—Kat snapped her fingers—“your life changes.”
Isabel nodded. “It is just like that. Your life completely changes. Hey, look, Meryl went home to the house she grew up in just like I did.” Well, sort of.
“What I can’t believe,” the guest said, “is that she’s actually waiting for that ass to call, to come for her. After the way he treated her? You’re not waiting for your ex to come for you, are you, Isabel?”
A little personal, lady, Isabel thought, aware that Griffin was half watching her. Waiting for the answer. She wasn’t waiting for Edward to call or come for her. But she wanted something from him. An explanation that would make sense. Maybe no explanation ever would.
“Good Lord, did her father just say that?” June asked fast, saving Isabel from having to respond at all. Isabel sent her sister a look of thanks. “ ‘You want monogamy, marry a swan.’ I wonder if that’s what Nora Ephron’s father was really like or if this is made up.”
Isabel and June were both quiet when Meryl told her father that she missed her mother, who had died years ago, even after she added that her mother “wasn’t good at a time like this.”
Isabel wondered how her mom would have been at a time like this. Maybe their adult relationship would have been different. Then again, if her parents hadn’t died, if she hadn’t met Edward, if she hadn’t changed so abruptly, who knows what her relationship with her mother—or anyone—would be like. She might have married a completely different man. Or perhaps she and Edward would have found their way to each other differently. It was impossible to know.
Isabel thought her mother would be wonderful at a time like this. For herself and for June.
“Is she really going to go back with him?” Kat asked when Jack Nicholson showed up with his “I want you to come back. I love you.”
“Isabel, would you go back to your husband if he arrived at the inn and said that?” the guest asked as she blew a bubble.
Isabel glanced at June and could tell that her sister wanted to smash the bubble right in the woman’s face.
Edward hadn’t called. Hadn’t come after her. Hadn’t said the words that Isabel admitted in the deepest part of her she did want to hear, just to know that she’d mattered, that their marriage had mattered. She had no idea if she could ever trust him again. But to know that he was sorry, that he knew he’d made a mistake and was begging her to come back—she did want that, if she was honest with herself.
“How about those Red Sox?” Kat said, widening her eyes at the nosy guest until the woman seemed to get the message.
“Oh, right, Jack Nicholson won’t see his affair again.” The guest made some weird snorting noise. “How can she be so stupid to believe him? I hope Nora Ephron didn’t do that in real life.”
“You really can’t judge unless you’re right in someone’s shoes,” Lolly said.
The guest blew another bubble. “I’m just saying that once a cheater, always a cheater. What’s to stop them, especially when they have you back?”
“Dear, I can’t hear the movie,” Pearl said, and Isabel could have kissed her—even though they’d all been talking through the whole thing.
Isabel mentally shook her head as Meryl Streep, now back in Washington, DC, with Jack Nicholson, was wide-awake in the middle of the night, staring up at the ceiling in emotional turmoil while he slept, oblivious and happy. How many nights had Isabel lain in bed just like that, Edward fast asleep beside her?
“Ha, see,” the guest said. “She doesn’t trust him. She gave it a shot, but she wasn’t stupid, thank God.”
“You know what I don’t get?” Griffin said. “How it’s possible to live with someone and not know something so big is going on inside them that has nothing to do with you. Makes you feel like one hell of an idiot.”
Isabel reached for his hand, and he glanced at her in surprise, but held her hand for a moment until she slipped it away.
The guest snorted again. “People see what they want.”
“Ah, there it is,” Kat said, eyes on the screen. “ ‘You know things are wrong, but it’s a distant bell.’”
June sighed. “I like what Meryl just said about how to handle your spouse’s affair. ‘You can stick with it, which is unbearable, or dream another dream.’”
Dream another dream. Isabel wanted to do just that.
The guest started clapping. “Awesome! Meryl throws a pie right in Jack Nicholson’s lying, cheating face and flies back home to New York.”
As the credits rolled, Isabel wondered what she’d do with herself. Maybe Lolly would be just fine. Her cancer could go into remission. And maybe Isabel would stay close or maybe she’d think about what she might have done if she hadn’t met Edward at sixteen and let him direct her life. She must have had dreams back then—more than not to be invisible. The only dream she had now was to have a child. Which meant she had dreamed another dream, she realized with a smile.
“Take a walk with me around the harbor?” Griffin whispered. “The rain stopped.”
“I’d love to,” she said.
Isabel went upstairs to get her purse and make sure she didn’t have popcorn in her teeth, and she wasn’t surprised that June and Kat, grinning goofily, appeared a moment later
.
“Are you going to wear that?” June asked, eyeing Isabel’s movie-watching clothes: yoga pants and a ruffly cotton tunic and ballet slippers.
Isabel was comfortable, but she glanced in the antique floor mirror in the corner. “Should I change?”
Kat shook her head. “You look great. A little lip gloss and you’re good to go.”
“Or a sexy sundress and strappy sandals,” June said. “It’s your first second date ever.”
Isabel was bursting with a goofy smile herself, but she said, “It’s not a date. It’s a walk. I’m not exactly ready to date anyone, even—”
“A gorgeous veterinarian?” June supplied.
Isabel couldn’t help her smile. “He is very attractive.”
“Very,” Kat agreed.
“Maybe if we develop more of a friendship and we do go on an official date, I’ll dress up a bit,” Isabel assured June. “But tonight, it’s just a walk.”
And so after June assured Griffin that she’d keep an ear out for the girls, off Isabel and Griffin went. As they walked, Isabel found out he was born and bred in Boston but had followed his ex-wife to Camden, Maine, where she was from, and since Alexa had been conceived on a vacation to Boothbay Harbor, they’d decided to move there. His ex-wife liked fine things, and though he did okay as a vet, he didn’t do as okay as her investment-banker boss with the multimillion-dollar house.
“I was blindsided like you were,” Griffin said as they turned onto Townsend Avenue, still crowded with tourists despite how late it was. “I came home a day early from a conference to find my wife in bed with her boss. In our bed. After two years of convincing me that we should have another child, that Alexa needed a sister. Emmy wasn’t even a year old when our family fell apart.”
Isabel shook her head. “I wish I could get the image of Edward and what’s-her-face out of my mind. How long did it take you?”
“A while. Too long. But it started fading. Now I don’t think of either of them much at all. My ex and I are cordial enough for the girls’ sakes, but I lost all feeling for her, even as a person. I make sure I speak kindly about her around the girls, though. Alexa’s still furious at her mother for breaking up the family. She claims to hate her mom, but I know she doesn’t really. It’s all just anger. And hurt.”