Chapter 3
Chapter 3
A high-pitched shriek fills the air, stopping Jane’s heart and stealing her attention from Dan.
“It’s freezing!” screeches a brunette woman at the table by the window, who is half out of her seat but not fully standing, as if she isn’t quite sure what to do. Jane does a double take, as the woman looks so recognizable, but Jane can’t place her. Or maybe she just has one of those faces.
“I’m so sorry, madam,” Javier says, reaching out with his hand towel to try and pat the arm of her white blouse, which Jane can see is wet. Javier must have accidentally knocked her water glass over.
“Don’t touch me,” the woman snarls. “This is mulberry silk!”
Jane has to suppress an eye roll. Mulberry silk? The shirt isn’t purple, which leads Jane to believe mulberry silk is some special type of silk she’s never heard of. A type of silk that only a woman like this, whose neck and limbs are dripping in jewelry, could afford.
The diamond on her finger alone has to be at least four carats. Jane’s never been a jewelry person; she doesn’t covet the ring for herself, she’s just in awe of the size, of how much it likely cost, of how many people that money could house and feed. It isn’t a fair judgment, she knows. Her own ring cost thirty-five hundred dollars, an amount somebody could easily argue could also be better spent feeding the homeless. She glances at the small diamond with the simple gold band on her left ring finger, remembering the day she and Dan picked it out. Jane thought they were just going to look, for Dan to get an idea of what she liked, but to Jane’s surprise, he bought it right then and there. When the saleswoman gave him the box, he, in turn, handed it to Jane—no bended knee, no question asked. Dazed, Jane slipped the ring on her own finger and in the car on the way home said: “Are we engaged now?” to which Dan replied, “For the amount of money I just spent, I should hope so.”
It wasn’t a romantic story as far as proposals go, but over the years, Jane and Dan had turned it into a self-effacing funny anecdote, one they kept in their arsenal of couple stories and dusted off at cocktail parties to entertain and amuse—a smoothly practiced act, where they each knew their lines and when to pause for laughter.
Jane turns her attention back to the woman, who’s in her seat and carefully dabbing at the sleeve of her blouse, and her dinner companion, a teenage girl around Josh’s age. Likely her daughter.
“Jane,” Dan says.
“Yes?” Jane looks at her husband.
“What are you staring at?”
“That woman,” Jane murmurs. “She looks so familiar.”
“Are you serious right now?”
“Yeah, look at her. What’s she from?”
Jane knows she’s seen her before; she just can’t place her. Maybe she’s an actress? Or one of those real housewives? As a forty-six-year-old woman, Jane’s embarrassed by how excited she feels at a possible celebrity sighting, while simultaneously disappointed that it’s not someone bigger like Sandra Bullock or hotter like Keanu Reeves.
“Remember Speed ?” she says. “That was a good movie. Ooh! Do you think they’ll order that crazy-expensive dessert? They look rich enough to afford it.”
“Have you had a stroke?” Dan looks at her with a mix of astonishment and concern.
“What? They do.”
“You’ve just asked me for a divorce,” he whispers through gritted teeth. “And now you’re…I don’t even know what you’re doing.”
Jane sighs. “I’m just trying to have a nice time.”
“A nice…” he sputters. “Do you even hear yourself?”
“Here we are,” Javier says, sliding a small white plate in front of Jane and then Dan. Jane notices he said the same thing when he brought the Negronis, and she knows it’s simply something waiters say—a statement that accompanies the presentation of the food—but for the first time the phrase strikes her differently. She looks at Dan and thinks: Here we are . In a place, both literally and figuratively, she never thought they’d be. Literally, at La Fin du Monde, about to dine on goose barnacles in a leek-sherry coulis with fiddleheads, celery, and wild greens, according to Javier. And figuratively, a middle-aged couple on the precipice of divorce, joining the ranks of the many—the majority of, if the studies are to be believed—couples before them. Divorce: an American pastime as traditional and commonplace and boring as baseball. She knows they both believed the lie that they were different—the exception to the rule. But when one gets married, divorce is nearly as inevitable as death is when one is born.
“These are terrifying,” Jane says, taking in the two prehistoric dinosaur claws on her plate after Javier slips back into the kitchen.
“Jane,” Dan says, still staring at her. He hasn’t even glanced at his plate.
“Look, Dan! It’s like they harvested them out of Sigourney Weaver’s stomach.”
“Jane!” He lightly pounds his fist on the table, rattling the silverware and glasses and drawing the attention of the diners at the nearest table.
Jane startles. Dan is so even-keeled, logical. Losing his temper is such a rare sight—like the aurora borealis or a white rhinoceros—all she can do is stare.
“I am not cheating on you,” he says, enunciating each word. His eyes bore into hers as if he can will her to believe him, as though he’s attempting some kind of marital Jedi mind trick.
She considers his declaration. Considers if she even wants to believe him, which honestly is more important than if she actually does believe him. She thinks of Sissy and Josh and how she and Dan had to carry on being Santa long into the kids’ middle school years, not because the children actually believed anymore but because they wanted to. Wanting to believe something is the basis of most successful relationships, she thinks. Wanting to believe that the person you are with is good or decent or that they would never do anything too terribly immoral or heinous like double-dipping a chip at a party or murdering someone. But the truth is, wouldn’t most humans do the terrible thing, given the right circumstances? If no one’s looking, you likely would double-dip a chip. If your child was kidnapped, you’d murder the person who took them. Look at any apocalyptic movie or television show—you do what you have to do to survive. Morality isn’t an absolute; it’s situational.
And if she’s really honest with herself, she can even understand why Dan would have an affair. How nice it must be to feel excitement about something— anything —again.
“I don’t really care, Dan,” she says, waving her hand.
He scoffs. “You don’t care if I’m having an affair? Nice.”
“It’s not—” She stops. How can she explain? “It was just the last straw. I’ve been thinking we should get a divorce for a year, I think? Maybe more.”
“A year ?”
“Yes,” she says, drawing out the word, trying to comprehend his apparent shock. She had assumed that while she had been thinking it, he had, too—and maybe that was why she wasn’t surprised when she found the text messages. A spark of anger, sure. Betrayal. But then it was almost a relief that they were—ironically—on the same page. “You can’t honestly tell me you haven’t even thought about it. That you’ve been happy .”
“Happy? Happy?” He half laughs. “Nobody’s happy , Jane. This is marriage.”
She blinks at him. And then picks up her fork and knife to signal she has nothing else to say on the matter and pierces the meat part of the alien claw. The fleshy toe. She tries not to let the disgust register on her face. This is fine dining? She manages to shave off a small sliver of spongy pulp with her fork and places it delicately on her tongue. “Oh!” she says, shocked at the pleasant surprise of a briny, tangy, and slightly sweet mix of flavors bursting in her mouth. “That’s actually delightful.”
Dan’s plate remains untouched. “What do you want me to do?”
“Do?” she says, confused.
“Is there another book we can read? Date night? I’ll go to therapy. Whatever you want. We’re not getting divorced.”
Jane lets out a puff of laughter. “Now you want to go to therapy,” she says under her breath. She points her fork tines toward his plate. “Try yours. It’s delicious.” She cuts a larger sliver, gently pulls the morsel off the fork with her lips. Chewing, she closes her eyes, enjoying the spongy texture, the flavor. In fact, that’s one of the things she’s been working on this year: being present. She downloaded an app, even though she listened to only one fifteen-minute “sleep story” that absolutely did not help her go to sleep. She tries to meditate every morning, even if she’s really just thinking about what she needs to buy at the grocery store and how much she doesn’t want to go. She bought a gratitude journal online, and it sits untouched on her nightstand. Still, she practices being present with the goose barnacle now, savoring the mouthfeel, and then wonders if she remembered to turn off her curling iron. She thinks of her daughter at home, sprawled across her bed, engrossed in TikTok or Snapchat. She thinks of the house catching on fire, Sissy perishing in the smoke and flames, all due to her own mother’s negligence.
Jane reaches into her clutch, which is resting on the table, and fishes out her phone, scrolling to Sissy’s name. She types: Can you check the curling iron in my bathroom? Think I left it on. She presses send and the blue bar at the top of the screen begins its journey from left to right, stopping about a quarter of the way. She holds the phone up, closer to the ceiling, then out to her right, willing the message to send, but the bar doesn’t move.
“Huh.” She glances at the bars in the upper-right corner of the screen and notices they’re empty. “I don’t have service. Let me see your phone.”
Dan reaches into his sports jacket and digs his phone out of the interior breast pocket. “Here,” he says. After entering his passcode, she notices his bars are empty as well.
Before she can say as much to Dan, Javier is back at her side.
“I’m so sorry, madam,” he says in a soft, kind voice, so that he genuinely does sound sorry. “We do have a no-cell-phones-at-the-table policy here.”
Jane feels a little embarrassed, as though she were a child getting chastised by a teacher at school, but that quickly morphs into indignation. She’s a grown woman. And she’s paying for this meal. “There’s no service anyway.”
“Correct,” Javier says. “As I said, Chef prefers—”
“What if there’s an emergency?” Jane cuts him off, finding his use of Chef as the king or dictator whom everyone should bow down to grating.
“There’s a phone in the lounge for customer use.”
What Jane wants to say: What if I left my curling iron on and my house is on fire and Sissy is trying to call me but can’t because my phone doesn’t work? What if she dies ?
What Jane says: “What if someone were trying to get in touch with us?”
“Are you expecting a call? You’re welcome to step into the lounge and give them that number. I’d be pleased to show you the way.”
She’s not sure if she should get up and call Sissy or if it’s her anxiety talking. “No,” she says. “I’m fine.” If she did leave the curling iron on, it likely wouldn’t burn down the house. That’s what Dan would say if she asked. She knows it’s what he’d say because he’s said it before, the other fifty times she’s worried she’s left the curling iron or the oven or the coffee maker on.
The uneasiness she’s been feeling since getting ready that afternoon intensifies. Is it her maternal instinct? Is her daughter in peril? Jane briefly wonders if this is what her sense of doom about the evening was foreboding—her house burning down while they’re at dinner. Then again, she’s always worried about her house burning down, or her children getting hit by cars, or a minor rash being the symptom of a rare but deadly illness—and whether or not she should do more to prevent these catastrophes, if she’s done enough, if she’s doing enough. Jane often thinks all of the difficulty with parenting can be summed up by one sentence: Am I overreacting? And how 99 percent of the time, the answer is yes, but how is one to know when it’s the 1 percent of the time worrying is warranted? Frankly, it’s exhausting.
Then, all at once, she remembers: Sissy isn’t even home! She’s at Jazz’s house watching that show. And Josh is at King’s. So if the house burns down, at least no one will be in it. Jane breathes a sigh of relief.
“How are the goose barnacles?” Javier asks, throwing a brief but concerned glance at Dan’s untouched plate. Jane’s grateful for one question she wholeheartedly knows the answer to.
“Absolutely incredible.”
“I’m so glad.” Javier cups his hands together and nods in deference. “Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
“Dan, you really should eat,” Jane says when they’re alone once again. She knows he’s going to push back, to fall once again into the divorce discussion, which Jane feels should center not on the questions of whether they should do it, at this point, but how—the logistics going forward. And there’s plenty of time for all that. No need to figure it out right this second, when they have eight more courses to enjoy. So she says the one thing she knows will work: “That’s probably a hundred dollars’ worth of shellfish on your plate.” Dan stares at her for a beat, then, resigned, lifts his fork and knife from the table and compliantly digs into his own barnacles. After chewing once, then twice, his eyebrows rise in surprise.
“Wow,” he breathes.
“Right?” Jane smiles, taking that weird misplaced pride in convincing someone to try something and then being right about how delicious it is, as though you have cooked it yourself.
Dan swallows and, a little more eagerly this time, goes in for his second bite.
“I think I may have left the curling iron plugged in,” Jane confesses.
Dan chews, swallows again, and looks at his wife. “You didn’t,” he says.
“Yeah, but—”
“I went back in the bathroom to check before we left. It was unplugged.”
She stares at her husband, feeling both wistful and sad, as though she has already moved on, lives in the future as a divorcée, and is reflecting on how Dan once upon a time always double-checked these things that she worried over, not because he worried about them, too, but because he knew she did. She adds this to the list of things she will now have to do without Dan: Take out the trash. Iron. Manage my own anxieties.
“We’re not getting divorced,” Dan says, as if he’s reading Jane’s mind, which she supposes is a natural consequence of living with someone for nineteen years.
“Dan—”
“No,” Dan says calmly. “This isn’t about me. It never is. This is about—”
“Don’t,” Jane says, her muscles tensing. “Don’t say it.”
Dan ignores her. Plows forward. “Did you get another rejection today?”
Jane is simultaneously impressed once again that Dan knows her so well, embarrassed that she’s so transparent, and livid that Dan is diminishing their wealth of relationship problems—including his own affair —and chalking them up to her personal career failures.
Sudden movement at the entrance of the restaurant draws Jane’s attention from her thoughts, from Dan, and she looks in time to see a number of people barreling into the dining room wearing an impressive array of earth tones, matching black gaiters shielding their noses and mouths.
“What in the hell,” she hears Dan say, but she doesn’t know the answer to this question, because everything is happening in slow motion and too quickly all at once, as if her brain can’t catch up. At first she thinks it’s some kind of avant-garde acting troupe, an art performance that she will pretend to understand but will have to look up on the Internet later to figure out what it means—like the movie Inception . Then she wonders if it’s a flash mob. She’s seen those on TikTok; maybe someone’s going to propose, although this is a strange choice of attire for such a happy occasion, and wouldn’t that be ironic? One marriage starting while another’s ending. But wait…are those… assault rifles ? Jane is no gun expert, but she did research various military-grade weapons when she was writing her novel Tea Is for Terror , about an evil gang taking over a high-end teahouse in London and holding everyone hostage and oh dear God .
She looks at Dan, her eyes wild, as one of the men stands directly at their table pointing his assault rifle inches from Dan’s face, and Jane thinks perhaps those Insta influencers were right when they said, Never underestimate the power of your intuition .
A fever pitch of frightened screams fills Jane’s ears, and that’s when she knows: her sense of doom had nothing to do with the divorce or leaving her curling iron plugged in or her house catching on fire after all.