“Perfect.” There’s a stray piece of goose down, escaped from one of my pillows, stuck to his damp cheek. I pick it off and kiss him on the spot where it had been.
“It was,” he says. “You are.”
“Do you want anything? Water?”
“Stay here.” He untangles himself and steps into the bathroom, where I hear water running. He comes out with a damp towel and then goes into the kitchen for a glass of water. “It’s our tradition.” He shares the glass with me and uses the towel to wipe my hot face. “Good?”
I nod. He climbs back onto the bed and puts his arms around me. “It wasn’t your husband who was cheating? I thought maybe he’d walked out on you.”
“I left him. But he wasn’t cheating. Not as far as I know.” I’m feeling intensely sleepy—the wine, the confession, our lovemaking, all of it. I close my eyes and let myself enjoy the feeling of this man so close to me. “I left because I didn’t know how to make a marriage work.”
Steve is speaking quietly. Slowly I turn over, but the bed is empty. Fading afternoon light filters in through the closed window shutters. I must have fallen asleep. I search the dim room for signs of motion until my eye stops on a strip of brighter light on the floor. My door is half open, and through the opening I see Steve, dressed now, in the hallway with Rocky and Jack, talking on his cell phone. I slip out of bed and tiptoe closer to the door. “The day got away from me,” he is saying in a voice that’s achingly cozy. “I’ll be there soon.”
I leap back into bed and under the covers, leaving a minute space to see out of. A moment later, Steve steps back inside and quietly closes the door. He unclips Rocky’s leash and tiptoes to the kitchen. I hear him fill Rocky’s food bowl and murmur a few words. I shut my eyes as he steps to the bed and sits down carefully next to me. He caresses my back and whispers, “I need to go now.”
I don’t say anything. If he knows I’m awake, he’ll tell me now that this can never happen again, we’ve made a terrible mistake, and he’s going to step up his efforts to work things out with Vickie. I turn, as if in sleep, and bury my face in the pillow.
There’s the sound of a leash jingling—it must be Jack’s. Steve whispers loudly, “Shh, boy, wait.”
He stands up from the bed. Then I feel him lean down close. “Whatever happens, don’t ever regret this,” he says in a low voice. His nearness is intoxicating. And then, so quietly it almost gets lost under the hum of the air conditioner, he whispers, “It was real.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I’m walking Rocky the next morning when the familiar chirp of “La Cucaracha” starts coming from my pocket. Don’t answer that phone, Iris, whatever you do. I’m in for a lifetime of crushing depression and soul-sucking guilt. For now I should try, though I suspect it will be impossible, to get on with my day. Nope, not going to answer. Not going to do it.
I answer.
“Yesterday was wonderful.” The sound of Steve’s voice weakens my knees to the point that I forget to be furious at myself. “You there? Doing okay?”
“Doing okay.” This is not entirely untrue. It must be that I’ve finally told someone about my mother, gotten that off my chest. It’s lifted me somehow, even as misery seethes and shifts just below the surface, preparing to burst through.
“I borrowed a shirt,” Steve says. “I couldn’t find mine last night and didn’t want to wake you, so I pulled one out of your drawer. It’s the Bellagio or something from Vegas. I’ll get it back to you.”
“Just throw it away. You’ll need to get rid of the evidence.”
Silence. Then he says, “We do still need to talk.”
Look, it’s my old friends Mr. Guilt and Mrs. Depression. Here they come now.
He lowers his voice. “Especially now that we’ve . . .”
Yes, by all means, especially now that we’ve. “You’re going to tell me I’ve got you all wrong.” My throat has begun to constrict, and my voice is squawky.
“That is what I want to tell you. May we have dinner later? I’d say lunch but I have to be somewhere this afternoon.”
Just the idea of food has my stomach doing cartwheels. I need to sit down. Luckily there are plenty of benches nearby, mostly unoccupied at that, since any even marginally sane person is either inside an air-conditioned office building or vacationing someplace civilized, like Antarctica. I choose a bench under a tree. The shade makes little difference. Rocky whines and rears up on his hind legs. I haul him up, and he puts his hot, round head in my lap. “You know what?” I say into the phone. “I can’t have dinner with you tonight. Maybe some other time. Like never. And shouldn’t you be getting back to the beach?”
“Never is not an option. Really, this is important.”
“I’m busy tonight.” To be exact, busy in front of the television, flipping channels. I’ll call all my old California friends, too, and tell them I’m coming home. I’ll call Teddy, if I can get through, and see how his movie is going.
At the thought of Teddy, my stomach contorts in shame.
Even with the bad cell phone connection I can hear Steve trying not to sound irritated. “If you can’t make it, you can’t make it. We don’t have to do it tonight, but we do next week. So, lunch, Monday, one o’clock, at the Lakeside Restaurant. That’s at the boathouse in Central Park. Reservation under Steve. You’d better be there, because I know where you live.”
A memory: Steve shivering as I kiss his neck and shoulders, Steve caressing my back, Steve’s hands on my body. Meet me at my apartment in fifteen minutes, I want to tell him. Make love to me again. I resist with every last shred of willpower. I can’t do this again. I can’t. Life is a disaster already.
“See you Monday.” He hangs up before I can argue.
I replace my phone in my pocket. “What do we do now, gargoyle?” I stand Rocky up on my lap and hold his front paws. He wags his stumpy tail and sticks out his tongue. He’s still ugly but, after all we’ve been through together, endearing, too.
“Want to know something, Rocky? I didn’t much like you at first. It’s okay to say so now, because I don’t feel that way anymore. My first impression was wrong. I think you’re a good guy.” It’s clear that Rocky is not only listening but also knows I’m talking as much about Steve as about him. “Hey, don’t get me wrong. Even if Steve weren’t married to Vickie, and I weren’t going back to Teddy, I still wouldn’t get involved with him. I’m not going to meet him for lunch, Rock.”
Rocky whines. It occurs to me that my biggest fear has finally come to pass. It’s bad enough that I’ve followed in my mother’s footsteps; now I’m having a conversation with a dog. And worse, I don’t think he believes what I’m saying.
I lower Rocky to the pavement and set him down squarely on all four paws. He performs the wiggly body shake of a dog who’s been idle too long and wants to move. I do not allow myself to say, “Come on, let’s go,” or “Want to take a walk?” Instead I lead him wordlessly to Central Park South.
It sounds as though there’s a fraternity kegger going on on the tenth floor of the Intercontinental. You can hear the party noises all the way from the elevator. I make my way down the hall to one closed door and stand for a few moments, too confused to knock. This can’t be the right room, can it? I turn to go back to the elevator. At the same moment, the door opens and a barefoot woman a few years older than I am emerges and nearly collides with me. Rocky, on his leash, barks sharply.
“Oops!” the woman and I exclaim at the same time. Then, “Excuse me!” Then we both laugh—though I can’t say whether her laugh stems, as mine does, from nerves.
“You must be here for the meet-and-greet!” The woman wears a bindi on her forehead. She takes my arm. “Come in. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss it. And she’s amazing.”
It’s not a frat party; it’s a Joy party. There have got to be fifty junior Joys stuffed into the room, which isn’t a room at all but a suite. There’s a catered spread of twigs and leaves, uniformed waiters dispensing a green, grassy juice
, a woman in the corner playing a sitar (or is it a zither?) and patchouli incense burning everywhere. Presiding over the scene is my mother, twinkling and jingling all over the room as her disciples crowd around asking questions and hanging on her every word.
“We are each other. The energy of the universe flows within us. With quiet minds we feel the oneness of the life force,” she’s saying to three women clutching shot glasses of liquid turf. The listener on the right puts her arm around the listener in the middle. “Don’t you see, Anne, that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you all along!” Anne smiles through her tears. They all hug, my mother included.
Walking over here to confront her, I imagined my mother would finally apologize for everything, all of it—for putting me in the most awkward position of my life, for showing me that those we love are never who they seem to be, for burdening me with emotions and assumptions I ended up bringing to my own marriage. And most of all, for leaving my father to die of a broken heart. I want to run out of the room. She hasn’t seen me yet; nobody would be the wiser. I’m shaky, though, and feeling a bit sick. I have to rest for a moment. At the far end of the room a small hallway leads to a half-open door. My mother’s bedroom? Surely no one would notice if I went in for a moment to compose myself before the ugly scene. I tiptoe over to the door and slip inside, seeking the same thing everyone here is seeking: peace.
The room is packed. Crowded with two dozen women admiring what, it dawns on me, must be my mother’s new line of products—the products she’s here to introduce. The women dab each other with essential oils with names like “Harmony” and “Gaia,” pick up and inspect yoga props, candles, desktop waterfalls, smudge pots, wind chimes, earrings, anklets, amulets, prayer shawls, caftans, head wraps, sandals, soaps, dream journals, refrigerator magnets, and wall plaques, all with the logo “Bliss Bits from Joy!” In the center of the king-size bed, two women sit together cross-legged in an empty pink plastic kiddie pool. “My rebirthing ceremony made me whole again!” says the one with her back to me.
Her voice makes me pause. Her sandy-brown bob makes her look, from the back, almost like Vickie. “Ever since then, my spirit has been cleansed,” she says, sounding like Vickie.
Remarkably like Vickie. So much like Vickie, she could be Vickie. Or Vickie’s identical twin.
She turns and spots me, and her mouth widens into a virtuous, rosy-cheeked smile. It lights up her gray eyes and wrinkles her freckled nose adorably.
“Iris! Namaste! I was wondering if you might show up!” She scrambles out of the pool, vaults off the bed, and wraps her arms around me. “You won’t believe this!”
She’s right. I don’t believe this.
“Val,” I say weakly, “what are you doing at my mother’s meet-and-greet?”
And it is Val—the undyed, conservatively made-up Val, who up until right now existed only in the high school graduation-day snapshot on her apartment wall. She unhands me, hugs herself, and sways slightly back and forth so that her white silk knee-length djellaba, with long, flowing sleeves that cover the tips of her fingers, rustles softly against her loose white silk pants. She looks enlightened enough to be levitating, but her jeweled sandals are planted firmly on the hotel carpet. My brain feels much the way my laptop must when I make it open too many programs at once. Val beams. “None of this would have happened without you, Iris. You and your e-mails!”
Most of my questions center on why Valerie Benjamin looks like a pampered suburban housewife. This conundrum has become even more primary in my mind than the riddle of why she is here.
“It had never occurred to me that the way I was living went so against my sense of Val-ness. Then in, oh, June I guess it was, I’m doing another series of groups for Michelle, and my flight is delayed. I’m sitting in O’Hare going out of my skull with boredom, so I get on my laptop and start reading some of those ‘Bliss Blitz’ newsletters you’ve kept sending to me. Was it a message, Iris? Were you trying to tell me I needed to change my life?”
A woman elbows past carrying a Bliss Bits from Joy! Tibetan singing bowl. Her waist-length braid whomps my arm.
“I just thought you’d think they were funny, Val.”
“I couldn’t stop reading. I was riveted. All the way to Indianapolis I reflected on the choices I’d made, and came to understand I wasn’t being true to myself. I wasn’t respecting my spark of inner divinity. I spent a good couple of weeks pondering this deeply and decided there was more to life than running around and having pointless sex. I needed to be true to myself. I needed to focus on Val.”
The green juice must be spiked. That’s the only answer for what’s going on here.
She presses her hands to her chest. “I’ve never been happier. I owe it all to Joy. When I realized she was coming to town this week, I even cut my vacation short to see her. Cut my vacation short! Humidity be damned! The old Val never would have done that!” She flings her arms around me again and kisses me on both cheeks, stumbling over Rocky, who’s been sitting quietly on my feet this entire time. He yelps in surprise.
“Sorry, doggie. Iris, you’ve got to come downstairs. I have something amazing to show you!” With her right hand she drags me by the left wrist back through the main room of the suite, where my mother is still surrounded by admirers. Val pulls me toward the door. “Did you get to pay your respects?” she asks. “I already did. You never told me Joy was so accessible!”
As usual, she doesn’t wait for me to answer, so there’s no need to tell her I’ve chickened out.
Val whisks Rocky and me into an elevator. I try not to stare at her as we descend, and think back to our last couple of phone conversations, her ending them with Joy’s trademark “namaste.” Val must be just trying on this goddess stuff temporarily, the way she tries on haircolor and men. I give her three weeks before she’s back to her old self.
“You’re going to be so amazed!” She hugs herself again. “You and your e-mails!”
At the lobby, Val makes a beeline for the hotel bar; apparently, there’s one thing about her that has remained constant. Pulling me with her, she sweeps across the room as if she were skipping through a field of daisies.
“Pookie!” She drops my hand and flings herself into the arms of a vaguely familiar-looking man in khakis and a polo shirt. From within the embrace, she says breathlessly, “Iris, you did this! Remember, you sent me that phone number? Of that guy you said would be perfect for me?” She smooches him.
I twist Rocky’s leash like a noose around my finger and rack my brain.
“You e-mailed her the number of some guy you met on the Internet,” the man interjects. “You told her you’d found her Mr. Right.” Val smooches him again.
Now I remember what she is talking about. “But you’ve got it all wrong. I sent you Buzz’s number, Val. This isn’t Buzz.”
“Of course it isn’t Buzz,” she says mid-smooch. She pulls back and looks at him. “Pookie, this is Iris.”
The man smiles with white-white teeth. “And so it is! You’re not a redhead anymore, Iris. Great to see you again!” He extends both arms as if to hug me. I dodge him. “You don’t remember. She doesn’t remember,” he says to Val. Then, to me, “Joe. The endodontist. From the Hotel Royal. Remember?”
Val plops into an upholstered love seat and tugs Joe down next to her. She crosses her legs lotus-style. She looks at me looking down at her and Joe. “Can you believe it, Iris?”
As a matter of fact, I’m totally mystified.
Val leans against Joe’s shoulder. “I called the number you gave me, but the person who answered wasn’t named Buzz; he was named Joe. This Joe. This wonderful, wonderful man. I didn’t know that yet, of course. I just thought I’d dialed wrong.”
“She read me the number, but it was my number,” Joe says. “She sounded so cute I didn’t want her to hang up. I told her, ‘Instead of Buzz, why don’t you go out with me?’”
How could I have sent Val Joe’s number? I think back to the night at the gallery, of Bu
zz standing at the fruit-and-cheese table, writing on a napkin. I remember putting the napkin into the inside pocket of my handbag. Then I picture the night at the Hotel Royal with Joe, he also writing down a phone number on a napkin. That explains it. When I get home and look in my handbag, I’ll find a crumpled-up napkin with “Buzz” and a phone number scribbled on it.
“God works in mysterious ways, doesn’t She?” Val kisses Joe again. “Iris, did you know Joe grew up in Darien? We’re pretty sure we met once at a tennis tournament. Anyway, our first date was two and a half months ago, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. It’s my longest relationship!”
Joe kisses her on her nose. “Have you told her the best part yet?” Val shakes her head. “Go ahead, tell her.”
“Ta-daa!” Val raises her left hand and shakes down her caftan sleeve to reveal a diamond as big as the Ritz. “We’re getting married! I told you it was amazing! Who would have believed I, of all people, would find my soul mate?”
TWENTY-FIVE
More?” Ilona leans over the black leather lounger I’m occupying and gracefully refills my glass of iced tea. I drink it down. “Better?” Ilona asks. “Honestly, I was shocked when you walked in here.”
I blush. The cutoffs and kitten-heeled slides I threw on this morning don’t remotely go together. I am also wearing a twenty-year-old Hansen Surfboards T-shirt that Kyle Trilbee, a San Diegan with whom I, at twenty-three, had an intense three-week relationship, wore in junior high school. Aside from being faded almost beyond recognition, it’s much too tight. “I look awful. Believe me, Ilona, all I was going to do was walk Rocky in the park. I hadn’t planned to drop in on Joy’s party, or to come here.” I did stop home between the hotel and Rubicon to drop off Rocky, though. I might have thought to put on something nicer to wear.
“I only meant that you looked upset. Your outfit is fabulous. Fabulous.”
I was upset. Am upset. Because of her connection to Steve, Ilona is probably the last person from whom I should be seeking comfort. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
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