She hadn’t mentioned, during Phyllis’s update on Larry the night before, that she’d bumped into him not so long ago—about two weeks before they decamped for St. Jacques. That last chunk of London time had been filled with unremitting errands, back-to-back chores of the deadliest kind, jobs that Vic undertook but also Jean, head down, as a fair price for her great escape. It was on one such day, a rainy December afternoon, burdened by still more of Mark’s exotic suits, that she’d been astonished to find Larry at the Paradise dry cleaner in Parkway.
Two identical dark blue jackets over his arm, that’s what she noticed first—because they were so much more sober than Mark’s—and on the other arm a brown trench coat, limp and heavy as roadkill. Unnerved, even considering a quick escape, she glanced out the storefront window at the busy street, people jogging and darting, holding newspapers and plastic bags up for shelter from a sudden downpour. Damn, no umbrella. Larry wasn’t looking at her load, but staring straight at her, waiting for her to pay attention.
“Jean.”
“Larry!”
“I can’t believe I’m seeing you here—today. It’s absolutely incredible.”
“Really? I wish it were. I seem to spend all my time in here. Back and forth, up and down Parkway, in and out of the Paradise, every day.” Jean wondered, as she did every time she saw him, about the color of those eyes. Sapphire blue? Maine-lake blue? No, a color represented nowhere else in nature.
“Really. You see, just this morning, well, I was thinking about you when I woke up.”
“You were?”
“Yeah… And then, when I went out to get the papers, I remembered I had a dream about you last night.”
“You did?”
“Uh-huh. You were wearing a kind of nightgown and holding a funny little posy of wildflowers, and you had a daisy chain or some buttercups in a wreath around your head, and—forgive me, you must think I’m completely nuts—you were walking toward me like Persephone recovered from the depths, with that sweet nearsighted look of yours, growing accustomed to the glare. Across a meadow, with lots of butterflies dancing around, do you remember?”
“
Remember?
I wasn’t actually there. I don’t think. I would’ve remembered that. Definitely. But, yes, I do remember the butterflies… Anyway, how on earth are you? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Princeton?”
“I can’t believe I’m seeing you.”
“Well…here I am. Much the same—from the inside, anyway. Only blinder. A lot blinder. Are you teaching?”
“Yes, here you are… And, yes, I’m teaching—or giving some talks. At UCL—the Bentham Lectures. They gave me digs not far from here… I’d forgotten this was your patch.”
Jean had worked as a paralegal in New York after her last year at St. Hilda’s, having promised her mother a summer at home: a cooling-off period, Jean understood, prescribed to treat her growing attachment to Mark. “You never know,” was all Phyllis said, even if Jean thought she did know. Primarily out of love for her father—whose initials, WWW, long before they’d become a byword for easy access to the entire known, unknown, and unknowable world, had looked to her like the
private airwaves connecting them—she’d gone to work in his law office. There she’d been assigned to Larry Mond: thirty years old and already a partner. But she’d seen him before. Her first term at Oxford had been his last and as a visiting lecturer he’d given such a compelling series of talks (“Taking Liberties”) that she’d done her Special Paper in his field, ethics.
So it had been somewhat surprising, in the summer of 1980, to find him in New York hunched over one particular third-party litigation. A group of shipyard workers was suing a cigarette manufacturer for the dramatically amplified effects of workplace asbestos when combined with smoke inhalation, a lethal mix not only known but also concealed, their lawyers argued, by both the cigarette manufacturer and the tobacco company that owned it. Bill Warner’s firm, and specifically Larry, represented the tobacco company. On the thirty-third floor of Rockefeller Center, in the wood-paneled, air-conditioned offices of Dexter, Warner and Whipple, the plaintiffs were known as the Dirtbags—Larry’s own joke about his role as the workers’ determined foe.
He had weekly lunches with the tobacco crew, southerners come up to the big city to see this mess through and keep an eye on the young attorney. They were good old boys with bear hugs and beer guts, midlevel managers on expenses who liked their Jack Daniel’s and didn’t care who knew it. Every Friday, they’d take Larry to the Autopub, a grotto on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth with booths designed to look like classic cars.
When he returned to the office, Larry would perch on the corner of Jean’s desk and tell her which car they’d sat in that week. He’d be a little drunk—it was Friday, after all, and this was definitely
work
—and his imitations delighted her: the childish collapse of a big-chinned smile, the perplexed bunching of a forehead, how they raised their upper lips to signal incomprehension and bared tobacco-stained teeth when he had to explain, once again, why he couldn’t use the dirt they’d dug up on the Dirtbags’ wives…
And though she was laughing when she said it, one afternoon she told him that he couldn’t have all the fun, and the next week she went with him. Soon they were both looking forward to Fridays, when at the end of lunch one of the managers would open the car door at the end of the table for Jean and ask, as she slid across: “What’s a pretty little lady like you doing in a nasty business like lawyerin’?” She had privately asked herself the same question, but what she always said was that they should let her know if there were any openings in tobacco.
In this romantic and parentally blessed setting, one afternoon Jeannie Warner had gone undercover with Larry to document with a foot-long lens and without her father’s knowledge the asbestos situation in the long-shut boatyard over in New Jersey. Through holes in the ceiling they had seen a mattress-thick insulation of solid asbestos: sufficiently toxic, as Larry would argue in court, to make a nicotine habit irrelevant. For the recce to the old shipyard, Jean had a fake name. Though she could remember hers (Debbie Ackerman), she’d never had to use it, this name he’d protectively given her, in case they were caught trespassing.
He was uneasy about being at the yard, and even more so about representing tobacco interests, but as a lawyer he’d do his best to win. Jean had thought her father might be testing his strength of mind, like the king in a fairy tale who sets obstacles for the suitor seeking his daughter’s hand. He couldn’t
assume
that Larry’s crushing the Dirtbags would guarantee her love, but he was completely confident of at least one outcome, and so it would prove: the Dirtbags lost their case.
After the evidence was duly photographed, Larry had torn his shirt climbing over a chain-link fence. He’d pulled the shirt
off over his head to examine the damage and, Jean supposed, to show her his chest. He thinks he’s plain so he works on his body, that’s what she thought when she saw it, touched by the surprise insecurity and duly impressed. He put it back on and they walked silently to the car, Larry’s ripped shirttails billowing out behind him like raggedy wings, glowing in the lateafternoon sun. It was then that the butterflies appeared: white froth over the field of flowering rye, just beyond where they’d parked. A lifetime later, Jean stood before him under a load of her husband’s suits and remembered the excitement of that summer afternoon in New Jersey, also the day she somehow and incontrovertibly knew she could never be a lawyer.
“Whatever happened to the Dirtbags?” she blurted, forgetting to ask after his wife.
Though she couldn’t be entirely sure, she thought that before answering he’d let out a little yelp. “Oh, they’re good. They’re great!” Still maneuvering the suits, Larry crossed his arms and widened his stance, rolling onto the outsides of his feet.
The Dirtbags are good? They’re
great
? But Jean was already too distracted to seize on his unexpected reply. American men stand like that, even our intellectuals, she thought, legs far apart to make themselves approachably shorter and to show they’re not about to rush off. Mark, tall as he was, neither spread his legs nor stooped. He didn’t have a listener’s stance. He kept his hands like tent pegs plunged deep in his pockets, and bounced on the balls of his feet while he was talking, as if in danger of springing up and away at any moment. “Never apologize, never explain” was his motto, the opposite of her own.
Jean tried to listen, watching Larry’s lips move, afraid she wouldn’t catch what he was saying; but she loved that American accommodation Mark had to mock; in fact, was suddenly high with love as if she’d been inhaling it along with these cleaning chemicals, even though she recognized it might only be something
like
love—a loose patriotism, maybe, or homesickness. Her mind was sprinting, trying to rein in a childishly skipping heart before it bounced into dangerous traffic, while Larry kept talking, still rolling onto the fillets of his outer soles.
“Joe’s at Wesleyan; Rebecca, the other twin, she’s taking a year off, volunteering for Doctors Without Borders. Looks like she may be sent to Monrovia—worrying. Now Jenny, if you can believe it, Jen’ll graduate from Concord Academy in the spring…”
Apparently—no, unmistakably—he thought she’d been asking about his children. Jean realized that he’d told his wife about the Dirtbags and that, in affectionate insult, the name had become family code for their kids. After all, hadn’t she and Mark called Vic the Rat, the Grub, the Nit, and (when it became clear she was going to be tall) the Runt, and not just Petal, or Flower, and Pie? And when Larry told Mrs. Larry—Jean couldn’t remember her name, the girl who’d replaced her at the firm—about the original Dirtbags and his heroic role in discovering, right over where the Dirtbags labored, more than enough asbestos to exonerate the tobacco companies, did he also, she wondered, tell her about Jean? Had he told her about teaching Jean to dance the
vallenato
in the conference room—the nine weeks of close but tensely technical instruction in the tricky wrong-footing of this dance that he’d picked up during his American Field Service year in Colombia, and the confusing distraction in that long room of his clean citrusy smell while everyone else took their lunch down to the plaza and sat, dangling their legs over the ice rink that was, just for the summer, a café?
She’d last seen Larry ten years ago, at her father’s retirement dinner in New York. And just as she had when she sat next
to him at that dinner, Jean found herself wondering what might’ve happened if she’d lived all these years where Larry lived instead of where Mark lived. With what seemed to her a Herculean effort, shielded by the steamed-up storefront of the dry cleaner, they managed to exchange some news. Before the Bentham Lectures he’d given a seminar at Oxford, though he was still notionally attached to the firm and went back and forth to New York.
“I thought you were at Princeton,” Jean ventured again.
“I moved to Columbia a few years ago, though the house is there, of course, and Melanie—” Now Jean remembered: his wife worked at the university press. He was keener to talk about his new book. He’d wanted to send it to her but didn’t know where to mail it.
A Theory of Equality;
she’d buy a copy. No, he’d mail her one, what was her address? He was the first person she knew who’d heard of St. Jacques. In fact he was better informed about it than she was.
Larry knew she was married to Mark Hubbard, pronouncing this as if it was a widely admired brand name, which it wasn’t, not quite. So she understood that with nothing else to build on, he was approving her choice, and this flummoxed her. Larry asked and she answered; he talked and she listened. She wanted to ask him twenty other things, but also, and urgently, she wanted to get away. He didn’t try to stop her when she backed out of the Paradise into the rain, nearly stumbling onto the pavement, Mark’s suits sliding on her arm.
Down the block, she ducked into the other dry cleaner, Blenheim and Blouson—which Mark called Stain’Em and Lose ’Em—and she started hating herself. Why had she run out like that? Why couldn’t she go back and say how about a coffee? She hadn’t noticed that young woman when she came in—she was staring at Jean. Plumping her rain-flattened hair, Jean guessed she must look especially, even alarmingly, bedraggled. The woman, who had long stringy hair not unlike Victoria’s and the lowest blink rate Jean had ever consciously registered, looked as if she was about to speak, or sneeze, or burst into tears.
“You do not know me,” she said to Jean, who immediately gave the only possible reply. “Of
course
I do.” Her pupils were dilated, glassy, as if she was on medication.
“I am Sophie,” she said.
“Of course you are,” Jean answered, having completely and obviously failed, despite the heavy French accent, to recognize Sophie de Vilmorin, the daughter of Mark’s famous first love.
Christ,
she thought, it’s dangerous getting your clothes cleaned in Camden Town. There was still another dry cleaner around the corner, Jeeves, the expensive one. And which maximally taxing acquaintance would she find in there? Mrs. H., up from Oxford for the day? Or her editor, Edwin fishlips Mackay, baldly spying on her, away from her desk?
“How
are
you, my dear?” she asked, squeezing Sophie’s thin shoulder, trying to make her feel better, almost moved that she seemed so hurt not to be recognized. Good God, she looked awful, nervous and waxy, her skin like plasticene. Probably a vegan, Jean thought, incredulously calculating that she must be in her thirties already. Jean remembered a charming, gamine girl of around eighteen. And here was this staring creature with hair that looked as if it had never been cut. Something generally unstable about her. It was the middle of December and she wasn’t wearing a coat.
They talked as the day outside darkened with the promise of still more rain and the man behind the counter searched for Sophie’s lost shirt, stabbing blindly like a fruit picker with his forked pole into the high branches of hanging clothes. Or rather Jean talked and the young woman listened, occasionally rubbing her eyes. She told the iron-starved Sophie about their
imminent move to St. Jacques, situating it for her on the map while taking in her bony frame, the reddened nose and chewed fingers, positive she hadn’t had a period in
years,
scattering a few facts about the island economy she’d just learned from Larry.