Best Intentions (9 page)

“Really?” I don't know why I assumed I was privy to all of their memories.

Deirdre laughs. “We didn't have enough money to eat here, but we certainly managed to drink more than our share. Jack had heard rumors that there were some racy murals in the men's room left over from the twenties so we snuck in and well, you know.”

“No, clearly I don't know.”

“Let's just say we got kicked out.”

“Quite decisively,” Jack adds, smiling.

“Caught with our pants down.”

They both laugh.

“How could I not know this?” I demand.

I was worried about awkwardness, jagged conversation, a night coated in scar tissue. The last thing I expected was this air of instant complicity.

“I love that you chose this place,” Deirdre adds.

Jack smiles, mission accomplished.

“Here,” he says, handing both of us a beautifully wrapped rectangular box.

“What's this?” she asks.

“Presents.”

“But it's your birthday, we're the ones who give you presents.”

“Consider them party favors, then.”

“Can we open them?”

“Don't you want to wait for Sam?” Jack asks.

Deirdre turns to me. “Where is Sam?”

It is a marital habit not easily relinquished to cover for your spouse, to polish the veneer, sand off the corners. Even now, I cannot let it go. “I'll try calling him,” I reply.

While they reminisce about their bathroom escapades, I dial Sam's cell but get his voice mail. I hang up and turn my attention back to them. Or try to.

“So how is life with your child bride?” Deirdre asks. She always did like to stir things up, as if only trouble can make her feel fully alive. It is so often just the two of us now that I have forgotten about this mischievous social tic of hers. “Are you happy?”

“I'm not unhappy,” Jack says.

“That's not the same thing.”

“What about you?”

Deirdre smiles. “I'm not married.”

“I realize that. I mean, are you happy?”

“Christ, Jack.” She leans back. “Who knows? Give me some ground rules, here. Are we telling the truth tonight or making ourselves look good?”

“You're assuming there's a difference.”

Out of the corner of my eye I see a man approaching and look up, but it is a stranger, not Sam. The chair beside me remains empty.

Jack turns to me. “How are the girls?”

“They're great.” I want to tell him how children change your stake in the world, certainly in your marriage, how it sometimes feels—this afternoon, tonight—that you are in a fragile boat together and every instinct is to right it, keep it afloat no matter what, how the fear that you will make the wrong move, tip it over, can still the
breath in your lungs. But I don't. Instead, I tell him about Phoebe's sweet forgetfulness and Claire's impending teendom, about their quirks and their attributes. Still, I can tell they are abstractions to him, these children, these heartstrings of mine.

“What about you?” Deirdre asks Jack when I have bored them enough. She picks up her tangle of meticulously layered hair and lets it cascade down, an unconscious habit that surfaces whenever she is nervous or hesitant. Once, in our early years in New York, she cut it into a short, asymmetrical bob, a style that was enjoying a thankfully brief vogue for about five weeks one spring; her hand would unconsciously reach for the missing locks and then fall, dejected, to her side, her fingers twitching longingly. She hasn't had short hair since. “We keep waiting for a birth announcement,” she says, with a coyness that doesn't quite hide her genuine curiosity.

“Deirdre,” I warn.

“Relax. It's just us.”

“It's fine,” Jack reassures me. He turns to Deirdre. “No, no kids. It's not that I don't want them, I do. Very much. But Alice wanted to finish her PhD first and now…”

“Now what?”

“Let's say it's up for discussion.”

“How romantic,” Deirdre remarks.

We start in on another round of martinis. By now, Sam is forty minutes late; his absence has solidified into a fact we are all dancing around.

I begin to think about what I will do, what I will say, if he doesn't come. I begin to think about what it will mean.

“I think we should open presents,” I announce defiantly.

“Are you sure?” Jack asks.

I nod and Deirdre and I tear at our boxes. Inside each there is a heavy silver frame with an identical photograph: the four of us on Jack's twenty-second birthday. It was taken with his clunky old Minolta set on timer and we had the hurried, too-close faces that come when you are rushing to outrun the shutter. We were tumbling onto each other, our heads bent at lopsided angles, our eyes glassy and
wide. It would be easy, looking at the picture now, to mistake all frantic energy for happiness.

“God, we were so young,” I observe.

Deirdre glances at the photo again, then leans forward on her elbows, her head resting heavily in the palm of her right hand, her sloe eyes tipped up. “Jack, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Why were you so absolute? All those years ago. Why did it have to be all or nothing? I never really understood.”

“You mean about moving to Cambridge with me?”

“Yes.”

I have vanished from the table, a forgotten witness on the other side of a two-way mirror.

“I loved you. I wanted to be with you,” Jack says simply. “Why couldn't you have just moved with me?”

“The fashion business is here.”

“You had no interest in the fashion business at the time,” he reminds her.

Deirdre nods, acknowledging the truth of this. “What would I have done there? Besides being your girlfriend, I mean.”

“You would have found something. I would have helped you.”

“You backed me into a corner.”

“I was scared of losing you,” he admits quietly. “I thought if you were in another city you'd just drift away. Find someone else.”

She smiles sadly. “You know what I was scared of? Turning into my mother. Completely dependent.” She looks away for just an instant. “The irony is that I seem to be turning into my father instead.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Never mind.” She raises her head, brightens. “Okay, your turn.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a small box wrapped in pale green rice paper and hands it to him. “Happy birthday.”

He smiles, already pleased, no matter what it might hold.

“Go on, open it,” she prompts.

He unties the bow carefully and removes the paper. Inside there is an ornately embroidered box. It occurs to me that the box itself
might be the present, exquisite but empty, but Jack undoes its golden latch. Inside, there are two luminous glass marbles of swirling cat's-eye sitting in navy velvet beds. He picks one up, its concentric spheres of opacity and light shimmering in his hand. He places it back in the box as tenderly as an infant and leans over to kiss Deirdre. “Thank you.”

“Do they have some significance I'm not privy to?” I ask.

Deirdre smiles. “Don't you remember how Jack always used to roll marbles about in his hands whenever he was nervous or trying to make a decision? It drove me crazy, actually.” She turns to him. “Do you still do that?”

“It was tennis balls, mostly, not marbles.”

“Really? I seem to remember there was some marble action going on.”

He smiles. “Maybe.”

“Well,” I say, pulling out the gift I have brought, “my present has absolutely no significance whatsoever.” I was totally stumped, after all I know Jack and yet I don't. The best I could do was throw money at the situation and hope for the best. Jack unwraps the mahogany leather billfold and thanks me with perfect if uninflected cordiality.

Jack turns back to Deirdre. “Your birthday is coming up next month, isn't it?”

“Don't remind me. It's still seven weeks away.”

“What do you want?” he asks.

“Eternal youth.”

“Don't you have to bargain with the devil for that?”

“I'm willing to negotiate,” Deirdre replies.

The detritus of the wrapping paper and ribbons lies on the table, our glasses are once more empty.

“Let's go ahead and order without Sam,” I say. “His plane must have gotten delayed.”

“Are you sure?”

I nod.

We are studying the menus in silence when Deirdre's cell, buried in her bag, begins to ring.

Jack frowns in disapproval, he does not want interruptions, her attention scattered away from him. He was never someone who liked to have his carefully plotted orchestrations altered. Jack was, is, many things—but easygoing isn't one of them. Deirdre glances at him and sees this in the furrow of his brows, considers it for a second, and flips open the phone with a slyly rebellious grin. Perhaps the blueprint, the essential tenor of our relationships, is set from the first established syncopation, no matter how many years have passed.

He leans back and listens as she begins to speak. It is impossible not to.

“Ben, hi.”

Jack scrupulously studies the wine list without looking up.

“Sorry, it's kind of noisy in here,” Deirdre says, a bit too loudly. “I'm out with an old college friend. My college boyfriend, actually, Jack.” She looks up and smiles at Jack, touching his arm conspiratorially. “No. It'll be too late. I'll call you tomorrow.”

She hangs up. “Sorry.”

“Who's Ben?” Jack asks.

“Someone I see.”

“Is it serious?”

“Seriously dysfunctional,” she answers with a dismissive laugh. “But you don't really want me to regale you with tales of my romantic misadventures.”

“There's nothing I'd like more.”

“I'm not falling into that trap, buddy. I still remember the time you didn't talk to me for a week when you thought I was flirting with the psych professor. I'd like for us to at least make it through dinner.”

“You were flirting with the psych professor.”

“Maybe I was. But you certainly didn't have to stick your fist through a wall.”

“The folly of youth. Luckily we outgrow that kind of behavior.”

“Yes, now we have reason and antidepressants and pass it off as maturity.”

Jack smiles. “I would like to hear about Ben,” he says. “If you want to tell me. I want to know what's going on in your life.”

“At the moment I don't seem to have the vaguest idea what's going on in my life. At least not that part of it. Maybe we should call Ben and ask him.”

“I'm not that curious.”

The waiter, who had gotten his hopes up when he saw us open the menus and is looming sourly a few feet away, clears his throat.

Chastised, we place our orders.

“Shall I remove the other place setting?” he asks peremptorily while taking our menus.

“No,” Jack answers. “Leave it for now.”

I stare down at my napkin, mortified, while Jack discusses matters with the sommelier in a lingo I suspect is meant to impress but is largely Chinese to me. Business taken care of, he returns to Deirdre. “Tell me about your store.”

“I'm not getting rich but it's great to have something of my own,” she replies. “I'm sure this comes as a shock to you but I hated answering to other people.”

He laughs. “Well, you never really did.”

“Of course I did. You just didn't see it.”

While Deirdre goes on to describe Aperçu, its layout and sartorial point of view, I spot Sam, making his way to us.

My fingers, which I had unconsciously been clenching beneath the table until they ached, relax as an immense relief washes through me.

But the overriding anxiety that had filled up every cell is quickly replaced with a burning resentment.

“I'm sorry. I circled LaGuardia forever. Flying these days is a nightmare.” The words rush out as he leans down to kiss me. I dutifully offer up my cheek, but I do not, cannot, look him in the eyes.

Jack rises and they do that weird male pat-on-back, not-quite-a-hug thing before sitting back down. Sam leans across the table and smiles hello at Deirdre. “Miss Cushing.”

“Mr. Barkley.”

The two have a sardonic relationship that I have grown used to over the years despite wishing it were otherwise. They challenge and often amuse each other, I'm just not sure how much they actually like each other, though they are both too savvy to make those feelings explicit to me.

Jack calls the waiter over and Sam hastily orders, barely looking at the menu. An awkward silence ensues as we struggle to reestablish a rhythm, creakily widening the circle to include him.

“So,” Jack says, “Lisa said you were in Chicago for a story.”

“Yes. A profile on Eliot Wells.”

I jiggle my foot up and down beneath the table while I listen to my husband lie.

“Interesting guy. Have you met him yet?”

“No. I've talked to a lot of his people, but he's still giving me the runaround. We can't agree on the terms. He has a lot of ridiculous demands, including veto power over his quotes, which I have a policy of never granting.”

“Well, surely once he realizes your impeccable journalistic integrity…”

“Journalism and integrity are not mutually exclusive,” Sam counters. “Which, my friend, is more than I can say for corporate law.”

They are teasing each other, smiling as they jab to soften the intent, and yet.

The evening is punctuated with land mines left behind years ago; even now, the war long over, they could explode at any moment.

Jack and Sam never really chose each other; they were thrown together because of the women they were with. There were flashes of almost unintentional camaraderie and eventually there was the thread of shared experiences but there remained an undercurrent of, if not precisely distrust, then watchfulness. It wasn't always that way. It seemed at first that they would be good friends. I know that Sam would have liked that, but Jack, the ambitious scholarship kid, had a tendency to poke at him, subtly prodding at his ease and his belonging, so seemingly secure in his blueblood background, which surprised and wounded Sam. In fact, Sam had watched his family's
fortunes shrink irrevocably before his eyes. His father had lost most of their money not in some great operatic downfall of bad investments but through the slow deterioration of wealth that happens through generations of benign neglect, a gradual reduction that is politely ignored for decades until, finally, it can't be. The pedigree is still there and informs every step, a hidden code that lack of cash cannot erase, but it is like a chocolate Easter bunny that you only realize is hollow once you've bitten into it.