CHAPTER 3 #6
“It used to be impossible to get anything done here,” he said, picking up a stack of manuscripts from the second chair so I could sit.
He sat down at his desk. “There were always meetings and new interns and somebody wanting to come in and shut the door so they could share the latest palace intrigue. I would go home at night and do my editing at the breakfast table, which meant I was either at work or working at home or sleeping. But now everyone prefers to work at home, except for me, because I’m the opposite: I’m tired of working at home.
Now I can work in my office and no one bothers me.
Some days I go to the cooler and fill up my little cup with water and bring it back to my desk and I don’t pass another living soul.
Excellent for my productivity but sad, of course.
Young people learn by osmosis, and now they don’t get to knock on my door and ask me what a semicolon is supposed to do.
I guess someone else will tell them. I wasn’t going to be around forever anyway. ”
“So you do think you’ll retire?”
Eddie laughed. “I think I’ll die, which I suppose is a form of retiring. That Ed, they’ll say. He was very retiring.”
“Stop it,” I said, and I meant it. Stop.
“Are you hungry?”
“Starving. I left before breakfast.”
“Left where?” he asked.
I had forgotten to tell him. “My mother’s. I’ve just come back from Winchester.”
“Oh, my,” Eddie said. “I suppose that’s why I’ve been thinking about you all day.”
As we got up to leave, I saw the small framed picture of a horse. “Whistler?” I said, though who else could it be?
He picked it up off his desk and handed it to me. “I was going to wrap it up,” he said, “but here you are.”
“What?”
“It’s your present. Leda got my mother’s vase and you get the horse.”
“I can’t take this.” The photograph was faded, four by six. All these years later you could still see what a beautiful horse she was.
“Put it in your bag and we’ll argue about it later.” He took the frame back from me and slipped it into the top of my overnight bag. “There. Done. We have to leave immediately. There’s so much to say.”
Café Luxembourg was a twenty-minute walk but we flew there.
All the crossing lights lit in our favor, all the tourists, walking three abreast, arms linked, caught sight of something in a store window that intrigued them and stepped aside.
Eddie and I, determined not to start any real conversation until we were properly seated, talked about books.
“Tell me what you’re working on now,” I asked.
“Tell me what you’re reading,” he replied, though neither of us listened to the answers.
We existed in a state of mutual distraction.
The lunch rush had ended before we arrived, and Eddie knew the hostess, so we got an excellent table alone in the corner. “This is where the soprano sits after the opera,” he said to me. “They have to have a quiet table to avoid vocal strain. After a full night of Bellini, their voices are tender.”
I nodded. Those sensible sopranos.
“I’m going to have a glass of wine,” Eddie said. “You can tally them all up in your head if you want, but I’m nervous now.”
“I’m not keeping count,” I said, though maybe I was.
The waitress came to the table, and Eddie ordered two glasses of Chardonnay.
I shook my head. “Only one,” I said. I was too tired for drinking.
“Two,” Eddie said. “Her glass will keep my glass company.”
Then we each ordered an omelet, and the waitress nodded and left us to our lives.
“So,” he said, beginning the conversation for me.
How thrilled my mother would have been to join us for a late lunch, to sit at the soprano’s table with a glass of wine, telling Eddie the story herself.
“She was perfectly lovely,” I said. “I was surprised. I would have thought she’d be angry, but she wasn’t at all.
If anything, she took responsibility. She knew she’d asked you to do something impossible. ”
“Giving up Skip? Well, she was probably right about Skip. Life would have been easier for all of us if I’d kept my word on that one.”
“Do you still—” I stopped there, remembering that I didn’t care what they did. My mother cared.
“Skip Hotalling does my taxes,” Eddie said flatly.
“The former senior partner of Mergers and Acquisitions does my taxes. And in return I shave the two small corns he has on his left foot because he doesn’t trust the podiatrist not to go down to the bone.
Sometimes we watch a movie—we share a strong preference for movies with tap dancing—or we work the crossword puzzle together.
That’s pleasant. I bring him presidential biographies and World War II spy novels.
Getting the advance reader’s copies still makes him feel special.
Sometimes it’s nice to be with someone you’ve known for a long time, and other times, not so much. ”
“And what does he tell Polly?”
“He tells Polly he’s going to see good old Ed Triplett. Best friend from Yale, best man at the wedding. She cuts a piece of last night’s cake and wraps it up, sticks it in his pocket for him to bring me.”
“Which means she doesn’t know or doesn’t care?”
At that moment the wine made a perfect entrance, and while I left my glass on the table, Eddie raised his drink to me all the same. “Polly Hotalling is not your mother.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning Polly was never one to ask a lot of questions. She has her children, her grandchildren. She’s got the house in Darien, the place in Sag Harbor.
She and Skip take the grandchildren on trips now, one at a time, anyplace they want to go.
One of them wanted to go to Mongolia last year, so that’s where they went. ”
I looked at him steadily. “Meaning what?”
Eddie sighed and put down his glass. “Meaning I don’t know what she knows and neither does Skip and neither one of us asks.
Sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no.
Mostly I’ve stopped thinking about it, because I have found that when you start to wonder about who you’ve hurt in this life, you can easily lose your mind.
Did I damage Polly’s happiness? Did I damage your mother’s happiness? What about Skip’s? What about yours?”
“Not mine,” I said.
“Well, that’s a comfort.”
“And not my mother’s. She made her choice. She knew what she was getting into.”
“No, she didn’t.” Eddie finished the wine in his glass and then set the glass aside.
“I promised her I’d stop seeing Skip, that I’d stop seeing men.
For the record, I lied on both counts. I meant to keep my promises and I did not.
I’d love to present myself as a sympathetic character, but I’m not entirely sure that I am.
Continuing to meet up with your college boyfriend for the rest of your adult life is a ludicrously bad idea, but somehow we made it into our mid-seventies without stopping.
That makes us sound like we were star-crossed, like Romeo and Tybalt, when really we were more like a habit.
Every point at which we should have drifted, we clung.
First the extension granted by Skip moving to Cambridge, then our marriages, then there was AIDS.
In the eighties, Skip was adamant that we only sleep with one another, though I guess for him that meant sleep with me and with Polly.
I didn’t exactly do a yeoman’s job keeping that promise either.
There were always too many other yeomen around. ”
“Were you in love with any of them?”
Eddie looked at me. “By which you mean, did I give my heart to anyone other than Skip Hotalling?”
“Let me know when I cross the line.”
“There are no lines,” he said. “You and I reside on the same side of the line.”
“We do,” I said.
“Love,” he said. “Yes. Skip aside, I was in love twice, once for a long time and once for a short time. Wait, I take that back. I’m going to say three times.
One long, two short. And honestly, we could count your mother.
It was an entirely different sort of love, but still, I loved her.
But through all of that, Skip persevered.
That’s just the way it was, the way we were. ”
I nodded.
“Were you in love with anyone in college?”
The abrupt change of direction caught me by surprise. “Fred Bowen.”
“Oh, I wish I’d known you then. Tell me about Fred Bowen.”
I didn’t even think he asked to spare himself more questions about the intricacies of his own past. He wanted to know, and so I told him. “Fred majored in biology, played outfield, and once wrote me a sestina.”
“And you loved him?”
I covered my heart with my hand to commemorate the place where Fred Bowen had once resided. “With my whole heart.”
“You went around together? People knew about the two of you?”
He had bought a bottle of red nail polish and written “Fred loves Daphne” in clear block letters on the white enamel underside of the sink in the men’s locker room.
He brought me there in the dead of night for my birthday, had me lie down on the floor.
“Close your eyes,” Fred said, working us under the sink. “Now open them.”
“Everyone knew,” I said.
Eddie nodded. “Good,” he said. “Good for you. But now imagine that no one knew, and everything that happened between you and Fred was a secret with potentially damaging consequences, and over time you got very good at keeping everything to yourself.”
“I get the point.”
Eddie reached over and took my glass of wine. “I’m not entirely sure that I get the point. It was a long time ago,” he said. “That’s what I want to tell you. It all happened in another lifetime, to different people. We should never speak of it again. So, what happened with Fred?”
Fred, so sunny and tall, always walking around with a baseball glove in his hand. “He left me for a girl named Breelyn. I became unreasonably fixated on her name, Bree-lyn. I hated that.”
“And did Fred and Breelyn have a long and happy life together after they ran off and left you?”