Chapter 13 Soup Course
Soup Course
Blair had to cut a FaceTime with Esme short to get to the pool house by the appointed time the next evening, though she did ask herself why she was being so exacting about it. Jack wasn’t going to care if she was late.
“Is Jack your boyfriend?” Esme asked as Blair attempted to say goodbye.
“What? No!”
“OK.”
Blair could almost hear the “… boomer” at the end of that “OK,” even though she was a proud millennial, thank you very much. It bugged her that Esme wouldn’t take what she was saying at face value. “He is not my boyfriend!”
“I said OK. I was just asking.”
All right. Maybe there wasn’t any generational warfare happening. Maybe Esme was just asking.
“I know I’m an adult now and all that, so it’s not supposed to matter that my parents are divorced. I just… don’t always know how to do the new version of things. Like, am I supposed to take an interest in your dating life? I don’t know if I’m acting the right way.”
“Oh, honey. All that stuff we said about it being about us and not you was true.” Suddenly, all Esme’s questions and teasing about Jack made sense.
“You also said nothing was going to change, but that wasn’t true. How could it be?”
“I… don’t know. Did we really say that to you?”
“You really did.”
Blair didn’t know how to explain that she was still learning that wanting something to be true wasn’t the same as it actually being true.
“I guess we thought that since you were off to college, our split wouldn’t affect your day-to-day life.
” That had been the whole point of waiting.
But she couldn’t say it like that. She couldn’t make herself into a martyr.
“But it would affect my interior life,” Esme said. “It did affect my interior life. How could it not?”
How could it not? Blair felt like a complete idiot. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK. It’s your life. You can’t live your life for me. I get that. And I want you to be happy. If you have a boyfriend, I want to be glad for you, and I want to get to know him and all that. That’s why I asked.”
I want to be glad for you. That wasn’t the same as I am glad for you.
“Do you want me to ask Dad if he wants to do Christmas together?” Blair was still disappointed that she wasn’t going to see Esme or Cal for Thanksgiving. Maybe doing a family Christmas was a good idea. The kids wouldn’t have to choose which house to be at, or have to house-hop and eat two dinners.
Esme’s face lit up. “Can we… do that?”
“Sure.” Did Blair want to spend Christmas with Reggie? And, potentially, his new “ladylove,” assuming she was still around next month? No. Was she willing to do so to make Esme happy? Absolutely. “What does Cal say about this?”
“I don’t think he has much of an interior life, so I don’t think he really cares.” Esme made a face that Blair interpreted as a sign that she was joking, but Blair resolved to find a way to bring up the divorce with Cal.
“Anyway, you have to go watch TV with your weird renter novelist man who is not your boyfriend, and I’m going to a concert, so I’ll talk to you later.”
Blair, who was supposedly in a hurry, went to the bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror. What was she doing? Hard to say. Maybe beating herself up for having thought that Esme would be unaffected by the divorce. Maybe dreading Christmas with Reggie.
Maybe wondering how this was her life now.
She didn’t let it go on too long—there was no point in brooding when she was late for her TV date—before she made her way across the backyard.
“I ordered soup.” Jack stepped back to let her in. “Is that weird?”
“Why would it be weird?”
“I don’t know. I was just thinking about how it’s mid-November. At home this would be soup season. I like soup. But soup doesn’t seem very LA.”
“Soup is very LA because it is—or can be—low-cal.”
“This is not low-cal soup.” He led her to a counter on which sat four big containers of soup and a baguette. He made a game show hostess gesture that was amusingly incongruent coming from him. “Lobster bisque, beef stew, mulligatawny, and grilled cheese.”
“Grilled cheese soup? What does that even mean?”
“I think it’s just cheese soup with croutons.” He pointed at a small container near the large one. “They’re on the side.”
“I find myself really excited for soup. I don’t think there’s anything weird about this at all.”
“I ordered the soup, and then I didn’t know what to do about the gate, so I just went and stood outside it. So there I was standing in the hills waiting for my soup in my shorts in November. For me, it was weird. How could it not be?”
How could it not be? That was a variation on the question Esme had just asked her. Blair was still unsettled by that conversation, but she ordered herself to get her act together. “What might be weird is if I have four bowls of soup. It smells amazing.”
“What’s the matter?”
“What?”
“You’re acting strange.”
What do you mean?
“You’re saying the soup smells amazing like you’re reading a line in a play.”
Well, shoot.
“Serve yourself some soup and tell me what’s wrong.”
Serve yourself some soup and tell me what’s wrong.
That was a perfectly reasonable sentence under the circumstances, but it also felt, at that moment, like the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her.
It was disarming. It made something catch in her throat.
She wasn’t sure she could talk on account of that thing in her throat, so she concentrated on executing the first part of Jack’s directive.
She even smiled a bit when he brought over a stack of extra bowls and said, “I, too, was planning to have more than one bowl, but I thought I’d go serially.
But I can see the appeal of simultaneity.
” She didn’t have a ton of dishes in the pool house, so the eight bowls he produced were a combination of four actual bowls and four of the giant mugs he hated.
The coffee table was set with full water glasses and empty wineglasses, so she made two trips with her various soups. When he followed with a bottle of wine and gestured to her wineglass with it, she nodded.
She settled in and took a sip of the wine. Her insides were… unkinking a bit. There was something about the soup in the mismatched bowls and mugs. About being in her house but not actually her house, so she didn’t have to worry about blanket folding or kitchen cleanup.
Or maybe it was more that there was something about Jack.
Her first bite of soup was the grilled cheese, and it was heaven. She almost said something to that end but decided that would be the coward’s way out. Serve yourself some soup and tell me what’s wrong. She ought to do part two of what Jack had suggested.
So she did something hard and said, “When you asked me why Reggie and I broke up, I told you the truth. We diverged. But the split was, I think, set off by this one particular argument. It wasn’t the cause of the split, but it was kind of… emblematic, you know?”
He nodded, and she suddenly realized that in some ways, Jack’s silent grumpiness was more about the silence than it was about the grumpiness.
In Blair’s regular life, when she had conversations, at work or in her personal life, everyone else was always talking.
Which she realized was a dumb thing to think.
What was a conversation but people talking?
But there was more than one kind of conversation. There was the kind you had 90 percent of the time, where it went ABAB. Call and response.
But then there was Jack. He left room for AA. Sure, sometimes he did that because he was an insufferable snob who disapproved of what you were saying, but sometimes… he just left room for you to think through things as you spoke.
“I used to get a lot of stuff done to my face,” she started. “Botox, fillers, lasers. Never went under the knife, but I pretty much did everything but, and I’m certain I would have moved on to surgery as I got older.”
Even though she’d just built Jack up in her mind as the perfect listener, she half expected him to react somehow to what surely seemed a non sequitur. He did not. Just beamed his inquisitive stare into hers, looking like he genuinely cared. He might be a good faker, but it was enough for her.
“And then one day about four years ago, I was reading Green Light. Have you read it?”
“Yes. Just since I got here.”
Which probably meant he’d read it because of her. She was more flattered than she should have been.
“I got to the part where Gio takes the blame for the car accident. And it was…” She didn’t know how to explain it other than “Oof.”
“One of those chasms you talked about, opening in your chest?”
“Yes. Exactly. You, too?”
“No, but I can see it. It was a great book. I’m just not sure I was the audience for it in that way.”
She smiled. The Jack she used to know, the Jack of the Zoom of Doom, would never have been so politic. “The gut punch wasn’t for you.”
“The gut punch wasn’t for me,” he agreed.
“Esme was fourteen at the time. She was big into ballet. She had an important performance coming up, and she had this monster zit. She asked if we could go to the dermatologist to see if anything could be done. I didn’t hesitate.
I took her to mine. We were sitting in the waiting room and I had this realization that the place was full of women who didn’t look like they were there for skin cancer or eczema or even acne.
I would like to say they were all middle-aged, but some of them were pretty young.
And there was a TV silently playing this loop of ads for various procedures.
Everyone in the waiting room and on the TV had smooth skin, and almost everyone had their hair pulled back in buns or ponytails.
It started to give uncanny valley vibes.
I mean, they were all beautiful, but they were all beautiful in the same way, if that makes any sense.
And they were all there to make sure they stayed that way.