Chapter XLV. Portrait of a Man. #2
Lorry is speaking again, but I can’t hear him.
The terrace is spinning. I reach for my glass of water, but my hand is shaking, and I’m not sure I can get it smoothly to my mouth.
And so I coil my hand there. Around the base of the glass.
The condensation cooling the fire inside me.
Taking me to another time and place. I am reminded of that first visit in Anouk’s living room.
The bottle of ice-cold Pellegrino on the lacquered tray.
Ames pouring it expertly. If only I could return to that moment.
Before she had turned me inside out. Before it all went sideways.
“You’re wearing her necklace,” he says.
My hand moves to my throat. “We have the same one. She gave … It was a gift.”
“Really?”
“Are you seeing Anouk?” The words fall out, inadvertent.
He takes a moment to respond. And then, “Not anymore.”
“But you were?”
“Last summer. And into the fall. I’m sorry, Ceece. I thought you knew. I could have sworn she told me you knew.”
There is a whizzing, whirring in my head and I feel as if I might explode.
That I will somehow combust right there on the terrace at the Café Habana, and that would be okay, because then I would not have to live through these next moments.
And all the moments that I know will follow.
The paying of the bill and finding my car in the parking lot and navigating the traffic all the way home and climbing into my bed and the crying and the crying and the crying, and the having to get up and get the kids from school because it’s Parisa’s day off and the making of dinner and helping with homework and all of it, when I just want to curl up and die.
And I think, not for the first time, that having children is a nuisance, because one can never fully check out.
But maybe that is, in fact, their purpose. To save us from ourselves.
“I didn’t know,” I say, as coolly as possible. “She didn’t mention it.”
“Well, I suppose knowing our past she thought it would be awkward.”
“Yes. I suppose.”
He continues to talk. But I’m unable to focus. And it incenses me that this reunion, for which I had waited so long, has been spoiled by her. That I won’t be able to lock it away and recall it long after it has passed, let alone enjoy it in the moment.
And then I surprise myself by pulling a page from the Anouk Ferrand playbook and checking my phone for longer than the polite glance.
“Crap. I’m sorry, Lorry. I seem to have missed a few texts from my daughter. She’s in the nurse’s office at her school. With a fever.”
“Oh. Okay. Okay. You should probably go. We can do this again. Some other time.”
“Is that okay? I feel horrible,” I say, digging for my wallet, my hands visibly shaking.
“Don’t be silly. Go. I’ve got it. Go.”
“Thank you.”
He stands as I rise from the table, barely holding it together. I make it halfway across the terrace before a thought arises, and without thinking I spin around and head back to him.
“Do you remember when you ended it? The second time. When you called me and told me it was over, and I sobbed and spiraled and could not understand why.”
He is staring up at me, uncertain.
“Why, after promising to never hurt me so deeply again, you had no problem destroying me.”
“Cecilia,” he says, and his eyes widen, darting about the terrace. As if he is afraid I will cause a scene. Clearly he has forgotten who I am.
I have not even raised my voice.
I retake my seat, and he stiffens. “What I wanted to know was why. Why I wasn’t good enough—”
“You were never not good enough, Ceece—”
“I’m speaking. I asked you why I wasn’t good enough, and you didn’t respond.
You couldn’t respond. And then three days later when you were done taking my calls and you didn’t think we had anything else to discuss, I got in my car in Westchester and drove to backcountry Greenwich because I wanted to see you, in person.
Because I needed you to tell me to my face why, after making so many promises, you were ending us.
Again. And why yet again you’d wimped out and done so in a telephone call, as opposed to saying it to me directly.
Because at the very least I deserved that. ”
“Cecilia—”
“And on a cold evening in November, I showed up at your parents’ house and your mother wouldn’t even let me inside.
It was humiliating. She claimed you weren’t home, which I doubted because the Corolla was in the driveway.
But she told me you weren’t there, and that even if you were, it probably wouldn’t behoove me to see you—she used the word behoove—because it would only make things harder.
And because she didn’t believe we were suited for each other.
Because we were ‘too different.’ I assumed that was code.
We were coming from different backgrounds, different families, different socioeconomic groups and that type of difference was tough to overcome. ”
I pause then. Letting it land. Her crisp British accent still clear in my head.
Somewhere next to me someone drags a chair. Metal on slate. The girls are still laughing.
“She said that?”
“She said that.”
We are both quiet for a second, and then, “Oh, Cecilia…”
“For twenty years I’ve kept that inside. For a long time, I even believed it,” I say, remembering Gwendolyn Kenter’s pinched expression that evening under the portico. Her thick, blond bob scraped back off her face. Her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Her quilted down vest and icy-gray eyes.
“When you followed me to France and made me fall for you all over again before breaking me,” I continue, “a third fucking time. Which was my fault, really, because by then I should have known better. But I assume she said something to you in Provence and got under your skin, which kept you from coming back. When I cried myself to sleep for months and held on to hope that somehow, someday you’d return, despite what your mom had said.
Despite your idea of wanting a legacy and thinking that what I was doing, assisting a photographer, working in fashion, was not highbrow enough for you.
That perhaps it was an embarrassment to your parents and your socioeconomic group.
And I carried that shame, for so long. I hated myself.
And the idea that I was a middle-class girl from a third-world island and no amount of Ivy League degrees would change that.
That I would have to jump through hoops my entire life just to breathe your air. For so long, Lorry…”
I catch my breath.
His expression is unreadable.
“But you know what? I’m pretty good with who I am,” I say, believing it. “I’m pretty good. Thank you for lunch.”