Chapter 9 The Rebel Deb #2
“They were scandalized by the whole thing.” She nodded, remembering.
“Mostly by the fact that I was an actress. ‘A TV actress,’ my mom always used to say, as though the ‘TV’ part was the problem. They thought it was tawdry. That was my mother’s word, and tawdry was probably the worst thing a person could be in her eyes.
I might as well have run away and joined the circus.
And Reggie was a personal injury lawyer when we met.
He only became a producer after he defended a movie star and that opened a pathway to entertainment law, and from there he rose quickly as a studio exec.
But when we met, he was an ambulance chaser.
Not that my parents had anything against the law, or even personal injury law, probably.
One of the girls in my deb class was the daughter of a lawyer who was a partner in a small but exclusive firm.
I’m pretty sure he did personal injury cases, and he was a multimillionaire.
But Reggie was the type of personal injury lawyer who had his face on the sides of buses. ”
Jack guffawed, and she was stupidly proud to have made him laugh. “So that pregnancy was your son.”
“Yes. And of course I don’t regret it. Cal was born when I was twenty. Then Esme a year later. So I did the young mom thing I’d have been doing back home, but it was different. I had a couple big career wins before Cal. I had my own money.”
“You got away,” he said, which struck Blair as an unusual but not incorrect way of summarizing things.
“I did. And then I got away from Reggie, and now it’s just me.”
She wasn’t sure why she’d said it like that. She and Reggie had divorced, but it wasn’t as if he were a malevolent force she’d needed to “get away from.”
“Esme sounds like she’s worried about you.”
“I think she is. She’s a good kid. But she doesn’t need to worry.”
Was that true, though? As lonely as Blair was, she was glad Esme wasn’t here.
Why? Because she would be embarrassed if Esme saw the cyclone?
Honestly, she couldn’t say that Esme hadn’t. During COVID, the last time Blair’s panic attacks had made an appearance, Blair had managed to hide them by “working remotely” in her home office. But Esme was more perceptive than her brother or her father.
And now they’d started up again, after several years of “remission.” So there was no one here to witness this round.
Still, it was as if Esme could sense something was going on. She seemed more worried about Blair than Blair would like.
What would Blair say if the tables were turned and Esme were the one having panic attacks? She would say they were nothing to be ashamed of. She would say it was time to do some therapy.
So why was Blair hunkering down and trying to muscle through?
Because, she told herself, this time she could clearly point to the cause of her troubles as the major life transition she was undergoing. And one thing she had learned, having some living under her belt, was that transitions ultimately ended. The cyclones came, the cyclones left. Eventually.
She shook herself out of her thoughts. She was supposed to be talking to Jack, responding to his observation that Esme had sounded worried about her. “I’m a bit set back on my heels by… life. But I’ll be OK. I’ve never lived alone, and it’s taking some getting used to.”
Which was why it was good to have company, even if one’s company was a snobby, cranky literary genius.
“Never?” He sounded genuinely startled.
“Nope. I came right to this house from Georgia. I found it from an ad in the paper—remember those? You know the rest: roommates, then Reggie, then kids.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think I’d go crazy if I was never alone.”
“You never lived with anyone?” She had willingly trotted out her life story. She wouldn’t mind hearing his.
“I lived with my parents, obviously, though never both of them at the same time, and when I went to college, I requested a single dorm room.”
“You never had roommates after that? Or a live-in girlfriend? Or boyfriend?” She didn’t want to assume. Though she was kind of assuming, because… Well, she didn’t know why she was. A vibe she got from him.
But maybe that was just wishful thinking.
But not because she didn’t wish for anything of that sort from Jack Branksome.
“Girlfriend,” he said, “and no. I got close once. I dated a woman for a year who was also an introvert. She used to joke that when we moved in together, we’d buy a duplex and each get a side.”
Maybe Jack needed to date someone with a pool house.
Not her. Someone.
It was a good setup, was the point, for scenarios in which an introvert needed to coexist with someone else.
“I can understand with my intellect, though,” Jack said, “that going from being married and having kids at home to being alone could be… hard.”
“Don’t injure yourself trying to imagine it,” she teased.
“What happened with your ex?”
She was a little surprised by the question.
Not that she thought it was too personal and shouldn’t have been asked, just that he was at all interested in the answer.
She got the sense that Jack was trying to be nice.
She had no idea why, since he wasn’t nice, but talking to him was turning out to be kind of therapeutic.
“Sorry,” Jack said. “None of my business.”
“It’s OK. Nothing happened. We just kind of…
diverged. When I met Reggie, he was a striver.
A hustler. I loved that. I was one, too.
We spent a lot of years striving together.
He was an ambulance chaser, as I said. Which I understand should have been unattractive, but I loved the way he made stuff happen.
He had a lot more money than I did when we met.
He swept me off my feet. Meals, trips, the whole thing. ”
“His face on the side of the bus.”
She laughed. “His face on the side of the bus. And then I started having some success, and he was my biggest cheerleader. Then I got pregnant.” She shrugged. “So we got married.”
“You wouldn’t have if you hadn’t gotten pregnant?”
“I don’t know. We were crazy about each other.
It’s just that we were so young, or at least I was.
People weren’t so sensitive to age-gap relationships back then.
We hadn’t yet heard all Taylor Swift’s songs on the topic.
” He was looking at her blankly. “Is it safe to say you’ve never heard ‘Dear John’ or ‘The Manuscript’?
Probably. But surely you have heard ‘All Too Well’? ”
“I have not.”
She’d been teasing, but he looked like a deer in headlights, a fact she enjoyed more than she should have.
“Anyway, I saw Reggie’s striving as a means to an end, whereas I came to understand that for him, the striving was—is—the point.
He was always wanting more. A bigger house, better schools for the kids, more cars. It just got… tiring.”
Exhausting, really, but she didn’t want to belabor the point. When Reggie’s perpetual striving started to shade into a kind of keeping up with the Joneses Blair knew all too well from her family of origin, it had made her start to fall out of love with him.
A house only needed so many bedrooms. A man only needed so many cars.
A woman only needed so many units of Botox before she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror anymore.
Reggie had agreed to divorce with a speed and ease that hurt Blair more than she wanted to admit.
She tried to think how to explain all this in a succinct way. Jack did not need all the gory details. All the gory details were embarrassing.
She settled for saying, “Reggie wants to go out, to have more and bigger experiences. There’s nothing wrong with that. I like to go out, too.” Didn’t she? When she wasn’t stuck at home folding her quilts and waiting for the cyclone? “It’s just…”
“Divergence,” he supplied, bless him.
“Yep.”
“So you’re on good terms.”
“I guess. We’re not hanging out.” His impromptu visits had stopped, since he’d found his “lady friend.” “But we talk on the phone a fair amount, mostly about the kids. He’s a good dad.
“Anyway, enough about me.” She hadn’t minded his questions, had even enjoyed talking about herself.
It had been bracing—why did that word keep coming up in relation to Jack?
She had been lonely, and it turned out that Jack was the perfect antidote.
But she was feeling like she’d talked about herself enough for one evening.
“How are you doing? Dare I ask about the writing?”
“I’m doing surprisingly well,” Jack said. “I think maybe I’m a full-fledged daytime writer now. I’ve been sitting by the pool and writing, if you can believe it.”
“So you’re not a vampire.”
“Apparently not. I think it’s possible that this change-of-scenery theory actually works.”
She chuckled. “So what I’m hearing is that you’re not a vampire but the zombies are working for you.”
He smiled in a way she could almost call fond—and in a way that made her stomach flip. “I guess they are.”