Twenty-Two
I HAVE THE CREAM CALLING CARD tucked into my purse, still unsure of whether I’ll use it.
By lunchtime on Monday, I’ve decided not to.
Wisest, I know, to pretend I have no special interest in the book.
But then I’m sitting with some of the girls in the cafeteria, and Ginny’s across the room, and Janine is talking about her latest date.
He took her to a show at the Chinese Theater and for a drink after, and then they went back to his place.
She lowers her voice at this last part, and all the girls lean in, and I know that I need to give myself something, even if it’s only a conversation about a novel.
Even if it’s just talking aloud about two fictional women in love.
So I excuse myself a few minutes before the lunch hour’s over and head to the break room, careful not to look at Ginny as I leave.
The cream cardstock is thick between my fingers. Who are you, Elise Eriksen? I dial her number, tell her I hope I’m not disturbing her lunch.
“Not at all,” she says. “But I’d almost given up on hearing from you. I thought I’d scared you off.”
“It just took me a while to get to reading it, is all,” I say. “I read it the whole way through over the weekend. Couldn’t put it down.”
“Can you meet now?”
“I’m at work. But I could meet right after.” I suggest a bar, a place the more stylish of the girls at the plant go to sometimes.
“Fun,” she says. “Five thirty?”
“On the dot.”
When I get there, Elise is at the bar with a man, waving me over. She’s dressed just as smartly as before in a wide-necked blouse and a full skirt, her hair styled in a bun. “Odette, this is my husband, Espen. He’s just leaving.”
Espen shakes my hand. He’s very tall, broad and handsome as a movie star. “Are you going to let me finish my drink before you kick me out?” he asks Elise, and I notice a slight accent.
“I told you that you could join me only until five thirty. Odette and I have a novel to discuss and we don’t need a man hanging around for it.”
“Do you see how poorly she treats me?” Espen says. He lifts his glass and gulps the rest of his drink. “All right then, I’ll see you for dinner?”
“Maybe,” she says.
“See?” he says to me again, and I like them. Both of them.
Elise waves him away and he’s gone, and we move to a booth, order old-fashioneds, sit back and regard each other across the table.
“You look a little like her,” I say. “Like Carol.”
“My eyes are blue, not gray. But thank you. Does that make you Therese?”
I laugh. Therese, working in a Manhattan department store, her tiny apartment, nights out at bars and plays, entirely free and alone at nineteen but for the boyfriend who’s dying to take her sailing to Europe. “Hardly.”
“So tell me all your thoughts. Isn’t it wonderful? A happy ending!”
I stare at her. She means it. “You must not have children,” I say.
She leans back against the booth, considers me. “You’re a mother. I hadn’t guessed. You look so young. So you found the ending, what? Tragic?”
“Well, yes,” I say. “She loses Rindy. It’s what Carol’s been dreading ever since the start, but she’s reckless because she’s so lonely and then it all goes wrong.”
“I don’t disagree,” she says. “But the women end up together. That’s no small thing.
When Therese was abandoned, it was more than I could bear.
And I thought I knew where it was going but then the book surprised me.
I’m not easily surprised by novels. I tend to see the ending coming.
But this one—I didn’t. And it was much happier than I expected.
” She taps her cigarette on the ashtray.
Peers at the ceiling. “There’s that line, when Carol is telling Therese that she’d almost prefer not to see Rindy at all, over the brief visitations: One gets over things. Isn’t that what she says?”
“Sounds right.”
“But you don’t believe her?”
“I interpreted it as wishful thinking. Some things we never get over. Don’t you agree? I do love picturing Carol and Therese’s lives together. It’s just hard to shake the cost of it.”
We order another round of drinks. My attention is caught by a cheer from the table in the corner, and when I look back at her she’s observing me.
“What is it?”
“I’ve been trying to place you,” Elise says. “At first I thought Italian or Spanish, but no.”
Twist in my stomach. Suddenly hot. I push my sleeves up and she grabs my forearm. There’s a streak of blue paint on it from last night; it didn’t come off when I scrubbed.
“You’re an artist,” she says.
“Oh. Yes.” I can’t keep up with these turns of conversation. “You have a very busy mind.”
“Let’s pay the check. You’ll take me to see your work, won’t you?”
“Sure. Sometime.”
“I’d prefer now,” Elise says. “Unless … you know. Your children need something?”
“My children are away in New Orleans, visiting their grandparents.”
“New Orleans,” she says. “I wondered about the accent.”
“I wondered about your husband’s.”
“He’s from Norway but he’s lived here since he was a teenager. So I’ll follow you in my car?”
“All right,” I say. “But it’s a drive. I live over in Willowbrook.”
“Willowbrook,” she says. She studies me. “New Orleans. You’re colored?”
“Creole,” I say. “Yes.”
Maybe this is why my sisters cling to Les Dames Amis.
So they can make friends without the moments of disclosure, the seconds that follow, waiting to see what the response will be.
Elise spares me, says right away, “I ate in Little New Orleans a few months ago. A place on Jefferson called the Zydeco. Divine. Okay, I’ll follow you.
Try not to lose me at a red light. I’ll go through them if I need to, but I’ve already wrecked one car that way.
A little Austin-Healey, earlier this year. Only had it for a month. Such a waste.”
“I’ll stop at the yellow lights, I promise.”
It’s a long drive, with Elise behind me in a dark-blue convertible, the top down, her hair tied in a scarf, huge sunglasses obscuring half her face. What am I doing, having her over? Did I ever fully agree to it? But then we’re parking out front and we’re walking down the steps and inside.
“The décor is fantastic,” she says. “Did you do it yourself?”
“Thank you. Yes.”
“You certainly have an eye. And this is your family?” she asks of a framed photograph on the wall.
I nod. It was taken in the backyard, before I moved out of Adele’s house.
“They’re stunning,” she says. I can tell she means it, but she doesn’t ask me anything else about them and that’s fine.
She looks around. “Mind if I clear a space on this counter? The best light is right here.”
“I’ll do it,” I say. I pick up some dishes and set them in the sink while she takes a rag and wipes off the counter, making sure the surface is clean and dry.
I’m flattered that she’d take such care of these drawings and paintings I’ve made.
I open the kitchen cabinet and take my box off the shelf. She watches me, amused.
“An interesting spot to keep your work.”
“Well,” I say. “You can see there aren’t many options.”
“I like a small house,” she says, but she says it in a way that implies she’s not been in many.
She wears stacks of rings on several of her fingers.
One has a large, circular stone, black and blue-green; it looks like a planet.
The jewels catch the light as she lifts the lid of my box and sorts through.
She’s quiet for a long time and then she glances at me. “You’re very good,” she says. “But you must know that. All your paintings are on paper?”
“So far.”
“You should try canvases.”
I lean against the doorway and shrug, though my heart beats fast and hard as she picks the papers up, lays them on the counter.
Each piece an intimacy revealed. She scrutinizes, assesses, looks closer, steps back and in again.
I expect her to critique my work like the Kandinskys in the magazine at Pickwick’s on the night we met, fear she won’t be able to help herself.
She turns to me when she’s finished. “What a rare treat,” she says.
“A true talent. It’s always terribly awkward when the work’s no good. ”
I laugh. “I’m glad to have been a relief, then.” I remember my manners and offer her a drink. We sit on the patio.
“Have you shown anywhere?” she asks.
“Me? Definitely not. I just started up again, after a long time.”
“My friend Joan is also very good,” she says. “She’s had a few small shows. She’s up in San Francisco. She locks herself away in her studio for weeks sometimes. But you can’t do that, can you?”
“No. Sometimes I wish I could, though. Or not quite. I wish I could stop time for a week. I don’t want everything to happen without me. But I want a million more hours to work.”
“I feel what you could do, given a million hours.” She smiles at me and scans the yard with her sharp eyes.
I try to see what she sees. Today, its wildness pleases me, but I can’t tell what she thinks.
“This is nice,” she says. “I’m enjoying myself.
I’ll admit that most of my friends become terribly boring after they have children.
Suddenly all the things that once made them interesting vanish.
Like amnesia. They wake up mothers and forget all of their opinions. ”
“Am I different?”
“Well, I didn’t know you before, did I?”
I sip my drink, consider it. “I am changed. Certainly. But I was only eighteen. I don’t know how many of my opinions were even formed yet.
I was still in New Orleans, and there was the war.
I was living with my mother and my sisters.
A child, almost. It’s more like my path was set in a certain direction because I had a baby, and I’ve had to figure out who I am, and how to be, while following it. ”
She’s watching me closely. “You sound like you might have preferred a different one.”