“William.” I sound stinging. No impact. His right index finger moves over the little screen that rules so many lives. William, rude as hell, doesn’t look up. Hasn’t he always been rude? Then they approach us and William’s interest is piqued. He places his iPhone in his pocket and while Lainie is invisible to him, his face lights up at Charles’s presence. He beams at Charles as they shake hands heartily, nabbing the other’s fists in glee. William, the kingmaker, Charles, a young king in the kingdom.
I look at Lainie again and it takes less than a minute to scrutinize her outfit—the uninspired, safe clothing of a surgeon’s wife, a chair of the department’s wife. The getup pleases him, the black sheath, the strand of pearls, the medium-heel Manolos, the angular face. Her hair, in a smooth knot at the nape of her neck, has an otherworldly sheen. Her lips are closed tight and I wonder, is she praised then vilified? A question that arises as I stereotype her husband, another overly confident, immensely important surgeon.
Then my gaze shifts to the actual man. He is a husky, hunky, brainy man. That’s a first. A man I have imagined who has yet to exist. I smile the fervid Elliot smile that I know by rote. Charles holds out his hand to greet me and it runs right through me, an electric charge that ignites us. We have never been introduced before, not in this life. Lainie watches, her head tilted to the side, her eyes wide, perplexed. William radiates success at his latest conquest, who might be more appealing tonight than he was during the interviewing process. Lure those doctors out of the cities and make them yours at Elliot Memorial is William’s slogan. I’m too busy with Charles to care. I’m too stupefied to breathe.
“Shall we?” William motions. “We’ll have our other guests sent along.”
It’s as if my husband is in some other country. I can barely hear him.
We exchange superficial greetings while we meander as two couples into the cocktail reception, but it’s lost on me. Country club living has never been this perilous. At the bar Charles orders a Glenlivet and William follows suit. I need something very potent—I wish to be drunk for the foreseeable future.
* * *
Having tossed back two apple martinis during our cocktail hour, I find myself surrounded by wives. Wives who owe me for carpooling, invitations to charity luncheons and elite dinners that only I can arrange, discretion when it comes to their spending secrets, my ability to look the other way when their children have been unkind to others. Most important is how I “Henry Kissinger” the herd of women; at least once a week I play the role. Everyone sitting down bows to me and no one gives a rat’s ass that the most beautiful player has just landed, Lainie. Tonight she has this wild look in her eye—or is it simply that caged-bird demeanor of the ill-fated wife? Now she’s just like everyone else and she hasn’t anything special to bring to the party. There isn’t a woman at the event who exists as more than an accessory.
Wind yourself up, Lainie, for the arm-candy duet. Ha, she can’t escape it any more than the rest of us. Husbands, houses, children. I imagine Lainie at the Y pool about to start her regime, Lainie at the Wintergreen Country Club, Lainie driving the curvy country roads in the rain—my topography.
Of all things, William notices how I’ve guzzled the drinks and am about to order a third. He gives me a quizzical look that stops me. As soon as we are seated at the dinner, the band plays. A woman in an ill-fitting black skirt and tank top is the lead singer and she chooses a Karen Carpenter song, “Superstar,” as the first slow number. William, to my right, is robustly scouting the perimeters, taking inventory. Charles pushes back his chair and holds his hand out to Lainie. She stands up and follows without moving her mouth. They approach the dance floor, where she halfheartedly places her hands on his shoulders. Charles is facing me and I take his cue. William is sifting through the guests when I leave my chair and levitate toward the dance floor, solo. There is no playing nice or suggesting that my husband break in and dance with Lainie, thus producing Charles as my partner. It’s up to me.
“May I have this dance?” I ask. Lainie backs off; her arms, those swimmer’s biceps, go limp. Charles first puts his arms around me and then flexes his body into mine. It is stifling when he pulls me closer. I owe no one anything.
THIRTEEN
“Coffee today?” I ask Lainie as we are about to leave the Women’s Y locker room. There is a mad exodus, as if everyone is on the same weekday schedule, although we aren’t. She gives me a look as if she’s torn about what to do and I realize that she is counting down to time at her drawing board. On the other hand, she ought to say yes or she’ll never have a friend in Elliot. I’m not convinced that she knows how salient it is to join me. She might be the “artiste,” compared to mere mortals, but each of us compensates for lost hours—let her stay up the night long if need be to paint.
“Lainie? Coffee?” I ask again.
She nods. Bingo. “Let me check to see if Candy is on the train.” She squints at her screen. “Yes, she confirmed a minute ago. I am good to go.”
“I’ll drive,” I offer.
Lainie sits in the passenger seat as the baby hills of Elliot show the first signs of autumn, a burnished top inch of every blade of grass and shrub. I take the road in one slick move, spiraling for a millisecond. Then we are there, pulling up in front of the Corner Books, as close a parking spot as one might wrangle to the Tea Tree. I lead her through the glass doors and commandeer the front table facing the window and overlooking Main Street.
She becomes anthropological, watching the women on the sidewalk, some swishing in the chicest day clothes, others sporting yoga gear. Their fast robotic motion—as if they are about to save the day, as if their mornings are complicated—can’t be newsworthy if you’ve lived in the city.
“Where is everyone going?” Lainie asks.
“Appointments,” I say.
“Doctor’s appointments?”
“Hair, nails, pedicures, Pilates … some women work,” I say. “You know, at home, freelance, part-time…”
“The very idea of not working on a canvas or on a sketch sounds so … easy,” she says.
“Sure, it has an enticing element to it. Think about it, Lainie, you could be sipping a macchiato and nibbling at a scone guilt-free.”
“Is that how it is, Jess? Is there a lightness to the days when they belong to you and your family and place is enough? When you don’t need anything more?”
I am the wrong person to ask. I am one of them at a price. She too could cross over, run hither and yon, to the shoemaker, wine shop, tailor, the vegetable market. She too could be in search of organic apples, the best goose liver pâté, the triple crème cheeses sold beside the low-fat Gouda. But it’s ridiculous to expect this of Lainie, who is at one with sea grass, how the river bends.
“Well, some women like it more than others,” I say.
“Charles would love it if I could be involved with the community.… He’d like me to let go of my … I don’t know … my commitment to my work. Ever since we moved here he seems frustrated when he sees me in my studio.”
During Lainie’s lame confessional, I remain heavily invested in the others who are congregating. I welcome the women from the other tables who descend upon us, who pay homage to me.
“Jess, Jess!” they exclaim in these rehearsed tones. “Jess!”
The tables are designated by age groups. Mid-thirties to early forties are seated by the window while those between forty-five and fifty-five are behind us. The older women have settled in the back of the Tea Tree. Everyone is coiffed and polished to perfection, hair is beautifully colored and foreheads are frozen in place. If anyone had a reason to furrow her brow, it would not be effective. A few women wear Hermès scarves around their necks and others broadcast their décolleté. Similar to the ladies who lunch in the city, I’m sure, except that there is no buffer, no diversity of street life once you step outside the restaurant. Lainie notices as she pulls the collar of her jacket around her neck.
“Cold?” I ask her.
“No, I’m fine.”
I sip my macchiato and am stunned. Evidently there’s been a mistake made in my order. I motion to the server, who knows me very well. “Greta?”
Greta rushes over, harried and worn although the day is beginning and she is only in her mid-twenties.
“Yes, Mrs. Howard?” She should be repentant since it has unfortunately happened before.
“Greta, meet my friend, Mrs. Morris. She’s moved to town and now that I’ve brought her here, she’ll be a frequent customer. Right, Lainie?”
Greta is discontented with the idea but silent, knowing there is more to this than an introduction. She gives Lainie a doleful look.
“Greta, I asked for skim milk. Always skim milk.” I frown in a way that gives away my Botox. If anyone asks, I say that I do it for my headaches. I’m too young to have begun for any other reason.
“It is skim milk, Mrs. Howard. Your regular order,” Greta defends herself.
“I don’t think so.” I push my cup toward the periphery of our tile table.
“I’ll order another, Mrs. Howard.”
“Yes, please do.”
Greta scoops up the cup and vanishes. I turn my attention toward Lainie.
“I suppose she’s never heard that the customer is always right,” I sigh.
Lainie waits, knowing as well as I do why I’ve invited her. We want to hear what each other has to say about Saturday night.
“My husband doesn’t dance, thank God yours does,” I say.
“Yes, Charles is a good dancer,” she agrees, sipping her macchiato. “Jess, do you remember the summer that we worked at my father’s marina?”
“How could I forget. I haven’t done a stitch of clerical work since,” I say. “There was the one small window that faced the boatyard and the bay. To this day when someone uses the word ‘repair’ I remember keeping track of the boats, the endless follow-up system we had to follow ‘to please the clients.’”
“We talked incessantly about what we’d do on our time off. I was always trying to sketch at Higbee Beach.”
“No, you also swam before the lifeguards were on duty. Your father used to go nuts. He’d say, ‘Every year, a local drowns, Lainie. Promise me you won’t go beyond the markers.’ Still you did; you would have lied and cheated for those swims.”
We both laugh.
“Didn’t you work at the Pier that summer?” she asks.
“Yup, by the waterfront. I was seating customers and my grandmother kept saying I should waitress instead for the tip money. I wanted the prestige of hosting, it appeared to be classier. Then I’d go with friends to the different beaches—not to swim or with a charcoal pencil and pad—to be the babe in the string bikini.”
“You were. You and your friends had that contest, whose bikini bottom stretched most across her hip bones.”
“I won. I didn’t have an ounce of extra fat on my stomach.” Three espresso machines make a loud swooshing sound at once. Greta returns with the skim-milk macchiato.
“You showed up sometimes in the early mornings when the lifeguards did their aerobic workouts. Mostly to flirt with Matt.”
“Ah, Matt. I’m not sure we should go there, Lainie.”
Matt, captain of the Cape May lifeguards, whom I’ve pushed out of my mind for years, along with much of my experiences in Cape May. Once our repeated trysts were known up and down the beaches, Lainie announced how little she cared for him, how his swagger bothered her.
“Don’t you see that everyone likes him, everyone wants him, Lainie, everyone?” I had said to her. She warned me that my fling with Matt would end badly, and it did when I swallowed sixteen of our friend Alice’s birth control pills in Lainie’s mother’s guest room. Lainie was my confidante first and then my nurse that afternoon I spent almost bleeding to death.
“Oyster roulette,” Lainie had said while I cramped and writhed in pain. “Matt makes me think of oysters, you know, irresistible and almost sly going down your throat. People act like they’re winning when they devour them. Not everyone wins.”
“The summer of ’90…” I say now, as if none of it had been that traumatic.
I take a thin purple plastic hairband out of my purse and point to it. “Liza’s. Three for two dollars at CVS.” I put it on and push back my hair to remind Lainie that my widow’s peak, my one feature she ever commented on, is intact.
“We go way back, the two of us, Lainie, lots of history.” I lean toward her. “How is it being in Elliot? The Y is the best pool, right?”
“I love the pool, Jess. It’s been a saving grace.”
“The water is oxygenated, and that’s much better for our skin, our hair. I was on the committee to get that kind of filtration.”
Women are getting up again, exiting, others are entering as if it’s a directed play and the first round of performers concede the stage to the second. Every one acknowledges me with an extensive wave. Half of a new round of women come to the table and interrupt our conversation. “Let’s get something on the calendar! So glad to see you. Will you be at the luncheon on Thursday? Do you need any more volunteers? How is next week looking?”
They move beyond us and settle in their chairs. Then the pause. “Where were we, Lainie?”
“We’ve gone from Cape May to the Y pool.” She looks at her phone and then away, toward the window.
“Hey, Lainie, I’m able to help you. Elliot is a standoffish place—you’re in the room with me, I don’t need to tell you. It must be tough on you, on the marriage—a move. All the driving. I know, and I’m used to it—it is too much. By evening I’m exhausted half the week. That’s with two children, not four. Four children, Lainie! How do you keep track? Well, at least your husband has a good position at a very fine hospital. William has made Elliot Memorial the caliber it is, you know.”
“You must be very proud of him,” Lainie says.
“He’s well respected and smart, if a bit deficient in emotional intelligence. I admit, I had to marry him.”
“I know that feeling. I felt that way too about Charles. I had to be his wife, had to have him as my husband. I thought he was my best friend.”
“And? Is he?”
Lainie laughs a dry laugh. “Well, he would like me to be his pal when he watches cable TV or a Jets game. He thinks that a room with a seventy-two-inch plasma television is a badge of family life—bigger, better, and improved. He loves the den so much that it hurts his feelings when I try to escape it. Little does he know what it’s like to be a referee there earlier in the evening, or else maybe he too would avoid it. What he gets is a room that the children have vacated. The other night he was watching Sean Hannity on Fox News. I swear that Charles was a Democrat when we met. He used to watch CNN.”
“You are a wife and mother, Lainie. That’s what we do,” I say.
Lainie holds up her hand to stop me. “We’ve lost years, Jess. I don’t remember how long ago we were last sitting together. I brought Charles to Cape Henlopen, where he caught more sea trout than the fishermen. He was tossing back the sand sharks. I’m trying to remember … that was after we’d graduated college … after your grandma died and you said you wouldn’t be coming down the Shore again.”
“I meant it. I haven’t been to Cape May since she died.…” I say. Still I haven’t forgotten Lainie, nor does she disappoint since she appears remarkably the same and unscathed by time and childbirth. I must have had a hunch that it would be like this if we were ever to cross paths again. I have resisted googling her too frequently and I haven’t paid enough attention to her husband, it turns out. That is what happens when you land a successful one of your own and you live in Elliot. Then again, Charles on the dance floor not two nights ago. One of the few surprises of my life that doesn’t seem overrated.
“How exactly did you meet Charles?”
She squirms and squeezes Aquaphor onto her lips from a small tube. “He came to my first opening.… He bought my largest piece of art ever.… He claimed he couldn’
t live without it, without me.”
“Well, that’s inventive.” I smile encouragingly while fantasizing about his shoulders and his V waist. Although I have no basis for knowing, I’m confident that Charles uncorks a bottle of wine without a hitch, that he understands the crux of the topic before the speaker is finished explaining. He has sparkling surgeon’s hands.
I repeat what she said several minutes ago. “Your best friend? That’s rich. No husband is a best friend to his wife in Elliot.”
“I thought that Charles could be that to me.… It was years ago.… Tom is fourteen, Jess.”
“Marriage works on another plane. If you need a best friend, I’d be the one, not your husband.” I glance at my iPhone; almost an hour has elapsed.
“I’m fine in Elliot, Jess. All okay.”
“I don’t believe you.” I pour my macchiato down my throat. “Around here every adage we consider out-of-date holds true. Wives depend on husbands, wives look the other way if they have to. Children are not egregiously spoiled, just privileged. Charles needs to be happy, meaning you need to be happy. I offer help.”
“I’m sorry? Help for me or help for Charles?”
“Lainie, if I bring you into the Elliot fold, Charles will be pleased. Trust me, Lainie, that is very important. And I’ve had the chance to speak with him—during the dance on Saturday. That’s what I mean by help.” I feel rushed. Greta is at our table, her face unreadable. “A check, Greta, and a splash more?”
Back to Lainie. “I offer my help.”
“Sure,” she says. I watch her compute her reality. The rivalry rises in both our guts. She pushes it back down while I position myself most expediently.
“You should come to the Arts Council kickoff meeting next Tuesday, Lainie,” I suggest. “As my guest; I can arrange it, I’m on the board.”
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