CHAPTER 3 #9
He was so pleased. “Do you? There were so many things I could have brought you.”
I shook my head. “You picked perfectly. This is the only thing I would have wanted.”
When we lay back into the pillows, Jonathan told me about the set of lead soldiers and how he had painted them after school and on weekends when he should have been doing his homework.
Rachel agreed to take the set for her son, though no twelve-year-old boy with his own iPhone wanted a regiment of British soldiers.
Rachel was taking them because she was kind and I loved her for it.
“When do you think you’ll go back?”
“Soon enough. There is a sense of the ending now, and we both want to get things finished.” He stretched and then resettled himself. “It’s awfully nice to be home, though.”
“I think we’re living parallel lives,” I said, and from there I told him everything, about talking to Eddie, and about Henry telling me Eddie was gay, going to the Century Club and then the wedding, about talking to my mother, and talking to Leda about our mother and Eddie.
“I mean, it’s fascinating and I also want it to stop. I’m too old to be nine again.”
That was when I remembered that tomorrow was Saturday, and on Saturday I had agreed to go to brunch at the Hotallings’.
“Who are the Hotallings?” Jonathan asked.
We were comfortable in bed, and so I explained who the Hotallings were as well. Skip and Polly were easier to unpack than one might imagine.
“And there’s a brunch in Darien?”
“At their house.”
“Are you picking Eddie up?”
I shook my head. I would drive and he would take the train.
He would get there before me. We had worked it all out.
Jonathan told me he was going to come. “Call Eddie and tell him to call the Hotallings. They’ll understand.
The husband just got back from a lengthy trip. He refuses to be separated from you.”
“You don’t want to come to the Hotallings’ for brunch,” I said. “Trust me on this.”
“I want to be with you,” he said. “I came back from Wisconsin to be with you.”
Like all long-married couples, Jonathan and I were capable of sitting across from one another at the breakfast table without a single sentence to exchange, which made this closeness a luxury—bed, horse, brunch.
That he offered to go with me to Connecticut was an act of generosity I could hardly fathom.
I lived in a school full of girls, most of them smart from wealthy families, a few of them very smart from working-class families or occasionally poor families.
Girls who loved literature above all else—ask me any question about these girls, and I would be able to answer.
I imagined Eddie’s life to be limited in similar ways, buffeted as he was by readers on every side.
We were especially qualified to talk to people coming out of libraries, bookstores, or certain classrooms. The rest of humanity? Less so.
But Jonathan could talk to anyone, illness and death being the guaranteed common denominator. He wasn’t worried about the Hotallings at all. I texted Eddie to tell him Jonathan was coming, and Eddie promised to pass the happy news along to our hosts.
The next day we took the Hutch north, past the exits for Rye and Port Chester and Scarsdale, the parkway living up to its name as a park to be driven through, the trees that lined either side of the road a rich and heavy green.
Jonathan seemed to be nothing but happy driving to Connecticut on his first full day at home, giving my knee an occasional affectionate pat.
Moreover, there was nothing in the story of Eddie Triplett and Skip and Polly Hotalling that surprised him.
“Everyone goes their own way,” he said when I laid it all out.
“I once fired a doctor who lived in Darien,” he said as we passed the state line into Connecticut and the beautiful Hutch became the much more beautiful Merritt and the tax rates lowered considerably.
“It must have been my first month or two on the job. I know it was before you got here. The guy who had the job before me left the mess behind. Didn’t want to deal with it.
Not that I could blame him. I didn’t want to deal with it either. ”
“What was he doing?” I asked, grateful not to be driving. Grateful for pretty much everything.
“Back surgery. There is a fortune to be made in back surgery.”
“He was doing back surgery on people who didn’t need back surgery?”
“He was doing back surgery on people who should have had their tonsils out. Anyway, the guy was impossible to pin down. He was always busy doing back surgery. For whatever reason, I ended up going out to his house to talk to him. I’d never been to Darien before.
Maybe that was why he wanted to get me out there, so he could show me what his overhead looked like. ”
“So what happened?”
“I fired him,” Jonathan said. “Then I dealt with the lawsuits. He sued the hospital, the patients sued the hospital. He tried to sue me personally. As we say in the business, it was a dumpster fire. That’s what I think of whenever I think of Darien.”
“What was his house like?”
Jonathan thought for a minute. “Like stacks of money shaped into a building.”
I laughed, and when, fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the Hotallings’ address on Pear Tree Point Road, I asked him if the surgeon’s house had been anything like this. Jonathan shook his head. “Oh, no. This is tasteful,” he said. “This is modest.”
We continued to sit in the car, contemplating. “I guess if all their children came home at the same time and brought all their children and no one was willing to double up in a room—”
Then the heavy wooden door of a type most often found on cathedrals swung open and Eddie came out. “Fullers!” he shouted.
It was the second time they had met, but there went Jonathan, arms open, as I was getting out of the car.
“Am I ruining your entire weekend?” Eddie asked.
“Brunch in Connecticut?” Jonathan said. “Are you crazy?”
“Polly wants very much to make a good impression,” Eddie said to me. “If I had wanted to make a good impression, I would have let you stay home.” In another minute she was there behind him, standing in the open door.
“Come in, come in,” she said with radiant good cheer. “You’re so nice to drive out here on a Saturday.”
Then Skip came out and shook our hands, showing us his formidable teeth.
His insistence that he was glad we were there was so convincing that I wondered if he remembered keeping his back to me for the entirety of the evening at the Century Club.
All three men had on khaki pants and navy sports coats, as if there had been a memo.
“I haven’t met your husband,” Skip said, looking straight at Jonathan, shaking his hand. Topflight polite.
“Your firm handled our merger,” Jonathan said, playing his ace while we were still in the driveway.
“You’re a lawyer?”
Jonathan said the name of his hospital. “We worked with your team during the RFP.”
That would be Request For Proposals.
Skip willed himself to his full and former height. “Did you stay?” he asked.
Jonathan shook his head. “Took the buyout.”
Jonathan had taken the buyout. Skip had taken the buyout.
In the span of two minutes, Jonathan had established the conversational triangle: I know your law firm, you know my hospital, we are both retired.
We all went in the house together, but Skip and Jonathan immediately peeled away, heading to the sunroom at the back of the house.
Skip said he wanted Jonathan to see the water, to see the restored Chris-Craft that bobbed at the end of the dock.
“Well, I need to see about the drinks,” Polly said, and then she was gone as well.
Eddie looked around. Only the two of us remained. “That was a neat trick,” he said.
“Give me a minute,” I said, walking through the entry hall as if through a strange dream.
“Pace yourself,” Eddie said. “It’s a lot to take in.”
Every item in the house appeared to have been chosen for texture.
The living room walls were covered in what might have been raw silk, lightly padded from beneath.
The extravagantly floral carpets, the sofas, the floral pillows arranged on the sofas, the arrangements of flowers on side tables and coffee tables both resplendent and familiar because, of course, Polly loved flowers.
She had ordered the arrangements for the anniversary party—peonies, ranunculus, anemones, dahlias—and here they were again, both different and the same.
They stood in contrast to the heavy swagger of the drapes restrained by multicolored silk ropes, the palest flash of lining showing at the edge like a slip beneath a dress.
Even the glass in the windowpanes seemed different from other glass in other windowpanes, so freshly washed as to appear watery.
The art hung from satin cords attached to the crown molding.
I had the strangest desire to run my fingers over all of it.
Polly reappeared. “Mimosas or Bloody Marys?” She looked at Eddie. “I know what you want.”
“Jonathan and I will have to pass,” I said. “He’s driving, and I’ve never been able to drink during the day.”
“So you’ll just have one,” she said. “One apiece. Which do you want?”
I shook my head. “Not unless you want to put me in the guest room.”
Polly clapped her hands. “Bloody Marys then. That’s what Eddie and Skip always have, and I don’t care. We’ll all have Bloody Marys. That will be fun.”
When she turned and left for the kitchen, I widened my eyes in Eddie’s direction and he held up one finger. “I’ll cover for you,” he whispered.
I took his sleeve, and together we crossed the flowered field of carpet to the far corner of the living room. “How often do you do this?”
“Come out here?”
I nodded.
“Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. Engagements and weddings, of course. We do birthdays in the city, the café at Le Bernardin, a play. When you put it all together, it averages out to something every fifteen minutes.”