Forty-One
Clara ignored Philip’s phone calls for weeks.
At first it was unintentional. The producer he’d connected her with at the Food Network kept her insanely busy and grossly underpaid.
She needed to supplement that job with print work, and she had zero free time.
Then she ignored him out of habit; she’d listen to the messages and delete them because he sounded so—normal?
Then it was deliberate. She got confirmation from another photographer that he was married.
A few months after the night she went home with him, they ran into each other at a Condé Nast shoot.
He was on a job for Gourmet, and she was finishing prep for Bon Appétit.
“You’re not easy to get hold of,” he said.
“Bad news for you; good news for your wife.”
He didn’t say anything. Just stood there and watched her position thyme sprigs onto a seared chicken breast with tweezers. “I wouldn’t have taken you back to my apartment if I had a wife,” he finally said. “I wouldn’t be calling you.”
She stood back and looked at the plate and added a few more leaves. “I’ve asked around. How come people think you’re married?”
“Because I was married.”
“You’re divorced?”
“Not quite, but soon.”
“Huh,” she said, looking up as if solving a complex equation, “that would make you—still married!”
“Clara”—he moved closer and lowered his voice—“you were in my apartment. Did you see any signs of a wife there?” She decided not to mention the items in the medicine cabinet.
“Can I buy you a drink after this and we can talk about it? Hear me out and if you’re not persuaded, I won’t bring it up ever again. ”
Over one drink and then a few more, he explained about the woman he’d married when they were both days out of college.
They’d relocated to New York from Philadelphia, and the wife hated the city.
She wanted to return to Philadelphia; she missed her family and her friends.
He insisted on staying in New York—his business was growing—and they tried a commuting marriage for years, until both were able to admit it wasn’t working.
“She has a boyfriend and they’re just waiting for the paperwork to be finalized before they get engaged.
She hasn’t lived with me for two years. We haven’t been together in any significant way for much longer than that.
I completely respect your unwillingness to become involved with anyone who’s married.
I wouldn’t, either. I’ll be divorced, officially divorced, in the next month or two. ”
She eyed him warily. “I swear!” he said. “If you want to wait to go out on a date until I can show you a divorce decree, that’s fine. I can wait. I will wait.”
She didn’t want to wait.
After their first date, she took him back to her tiny studio, the one she found during the years when she was working so many hours she was only home to sleep.
“It doesn’t look like anyone lives here,” Philip said, amused.
He stepped over plastic crates filled with her styling supplies to examine a wall plastered with photos torn from high-end magazines and postcards from art museums. A huge swath of the wall was devoted to classic still lifes, most but not all from the Dutch masters.
On her desk, a few photographs he hadn’t seen in her portfolio. “Are these yours?” he asked.
“They are. My private work, I guess you’d call it.”
“Who took the photos?” Philip asked.
“David Headley.”
He whistled. “Pricey.”
“Yeah. He gave me a break, but I could only afford those three.”
He picked up a photograph of a footed silver bowl brimming with Italian plums in all shades of dusty purple, much of the fruit still tethered to bent branches.
A single halved plum sat front and center, its interior golden flesh and woody pit drawing the eye to the surrounding leaves, many of them skeletonized from insects.
A perfectly imperfect bowl of fruit. On the table beneath the plums, Clara had scattered walnut pieces among shards of broken shell.
Peeking from behind the bottom of the bowl’s base, the tiny head, snout, and whiskers of a mouse.
“Is this a live mouse?”
“Have you ever tried to wrangle a mouse? No, I’m friendly with someone who runs that taxidermy spot in SoHo. He lets me borrow stuff.”
“Clara, these are extraordinary. People should be hiring you to do this, not plates of cheeseburgers.”
“I wish,” she said. “I tried last week on a shoot at the Fulton Fish Market. Went for a Chardin kind of look and the client lost it.” She did an impression of the executive, wide-eyed and panicked.
“‘This looks like something from The Silence of the Lambs! We aren’t trying to repulse people!’” They both laughed.
“I guess the flayed skate on a hook was a step too far.”
“We are, as they say, very much on the same page.” He took his portfolio out of the large messenger bag slung across his chest and handed it to her. “The ones in the back,” he said.
She flipped to the back pages, and it was like seeing her own thoughts brought to life. The photos were stunning—high-end, painterly, and expertly composed. Better than hers, though she’d have approached some things differently. “Did you use a stylist?”
“I had a little help from Annie Howe. You know her?”
“Yeah, she’s great.”
“Not as good as you.”
“Agree to agree.” She pointed to one of his photos and then to a postcard on her wall. “Pieter Claesz.”
“Yes.”
“Where have you been all my life?” she joked as she ran a hand over the print, a crusty loaf of bread, an empty sherry glass with a tiny fly on the rim.
“Recently? Trying to get you to answer my calls.”
“Well,” she said, turning to him and miming picking up a phone, “Hello!”
CLARA TOOK HER RELATIONSHIP WITH Philip slowly, steadily, seriously.
Sometimes they collaborated on assignments where their affection subtly wove into the work—only to circle back and deepen their relationship.
They had a rhythm, and he taught her to see the food not only from the perspective of a cook or a stylist or a diner, but as the camera would see it.
Once she made that shift, she could spot and correct problems before he even looked through the lens.
He was so easy to be with! Her usual style, slash and burn, working against the grain, held no appeal for her when it came to Philip.
“You know,” he said to her over a dinner of mussels marinara that she’d made at his apartment after a long stretch of separate assignments, “when I brought up your name today with Gourmet, they said you were, and I’m quoting, ‘talented but difficult.’”
“I guess I can be. I’m less impatient than I used to be, less temperamental. You must be a good influence on me,” she said, a little flirty, a little pleased with herself. Pleased with him. “What did you say to them?”
“I said I’d never had a contentious moment with you. I said you were the most talented stylist I knew. I did not tell them you can bring me to my knees with your tongue.”
“Why? You don’t want me to get the job?”
He laughed and took her hand and pulled her toward the stairs to the bedroom. “Show me what you’ve got, and I might be able to pull you in on the Thanksgiving issue.”
She resisted Philip’s invitation to move in for months, wouldn’t even leave clothing at his place. “Don’t you see enough of me all week?” she asked.
“No,” he said. Just no. That one word, stated so plainly, moved her.
He wanted more of her, and she was grateful to find she wanted more of him, too.
While leaving his house early one morning wearing an inappropriately heavy woolen coat because it had become spring overnight the way it sometimes did in New York City, unable to put in her contacts because she refused to keep a lousy bottle of solution at his place, eyes burning, she thought, What is wrong with me?
The following weekend, almost exactly a year after she’d woken up in his bed, they rented a small van and moved her in.
The next morning it seemed like all the wisteria on the block had bloomed at once.
“Ah, look,” Philip said as they walked to the local diner for breakfast, “word has leaked out that Clara Larkin is in residence.”
Out of superstition or fear, Clara wasn’t sure which, she kept her tiny apartment.
At first, she’d stop by regularly to pick up her mail and check personal messages on the answering machine, mostly Bridie asking her to please, please call back.
She couldn’t avoid everyone forever, but she could avoid them for now.
They were all used to it. Communication happened on Clara’s terms, exactly as she liked.
Soon, she got lazy about stopping by the old place, which was why she never got the thick ivory envelope containing an invitation and never saw the back flap of the envelope, where right below the return address, in her sister’s spidery script, was one sentence: Bridie is a Bride!