Chapter Six
Penny wore my earrings to lunch.
She was already at the table when I arrived, at Méli-Mélo on a Tuesday, rosé ordered, sunglasses up in her hair, waving at me across the room with the whole of her arm the way she'd done for seven years, and I was halfway to the table before I saw them and my step nearly caught.
Old European cut diamonds, yellow gold bezels, the left stone a shade smaller than the right because they were vintage and Mark had liked that about them.
He'd given them to me at breakfast on our first anniversary, in the box, with toast going cold, and said, they're old and they don't match, but they work together anyway, and they made me think of us, and it was the single best thing he ever said to me.
They sat in her ears and the audacity of it stunned me.
"You look amazing," Penny said, standing to kiss my cheek. Gardenia and money. "Sit, sit. I ordered you the wine you like. I have so much to tell you about this party, I'm already exhausted."
I sat. I smiled. Somewhere below the smile, in the low cold room where I kept things now, a voice said: look at what she's wearing, look at what she chose to wear, to lunch, with you, and I picked up the rosé I didn't want and said, "Tell me everything."
Here's what I learned at that lunch, while my best friend wore my anniversary present and split a burrata with me.
One. The party. September twelfth, their house, a hundred and ten people, which was everyone that mattered for my plan, the whole gilded circle of them.
Marquee on the back lawn, dinner at long tables, a band from the city, and toasts before dessert, because, and she said this with her wrist resting on the table, Oliver always gets sentimental at the toasts and I've learned to get them over with early.
She wanted my help with the seating chart and the run of the evening.
She actually said the words, you're the only one I trust with a room, Lil.
So I said yes. I said yes, and I meant it more than she will ever know, and the low cold room filed away: I am now in charge of the seating chart, the timing, and the microphone.
Two. Oliver. She complained about him for twenty minutes with real fluency, his snoring, his golf, the way he chewed, and none of it was new, wives complain, I'd heard this set before and laughed at it.
What was new was what ran underneath it.
It had turned conclusive. She wasn't cataloguing a husband's flaws, she was reading out a verdict she'd already signed, and at one point she looked out the window and said, in a different voice, "You know what I realized this spring?
I've been wasting my life instead of living it.
Some marriages just run their course, and everyone's too polite to say so.
" Her eyes came back to me. "Don't you think? "
"I think unhappy people should do something about it," I said. I wasn’t going to make this easy for her. “I’m glad Mark and I have never had to face that though.”
Three. She checked on my marriage twice more throughout lunch, and she was good, she was so good, it came dressed as love both times.
You and Mark seemed a little off at the Fourth, everything okay?
And later, softer, over coffee: you'd tell me if you two were struggling, wouldn't you?
I know you, you go quiet and handle things alone.
I looked at her doing reconnaissance through the eyeholes of my best friend's face, and I reached across the table and squeezed her hand and said, "We're fine.
Honestly. He's been so busy I barely see him, but that's the job. I know he’s doing it for the future.
For us. We have so many plans." And she squeezed back, and there was a flicker in her, quick as a fish, and I recognized it because I'd have felt the same in her place.
Annoyance. She wanted us to be falling apart, so she could feel better about what she was doing.
Four. The rosé did its work by the end, she'd had most of the bottle, and she got expansive the way she did, and she leaned in with her chin on her hand, my diamonds catching the light, and said, "Can I say something insane?
I have this feeling about this birthday.
Like it's the last one of my old life. This time next year everything's going to be different, I can feel it, everything I actually want is finally close enough to touch.
" She laughed at herself, glowing, lit up with her secret.
"God, listen to me. Don't let me drink at my own party. "
"Different how?" I said, gently, like a friend.
"Just different. Better. Mine." She waved it away, but she couldn't keep the smile down, and I understood that I was watching a woman in love, genuinely in love, with my husband, planning her wedding in her head at lunch with the current wife, and the thing that rose in me wasn't even rage.
Rage I'd been braced for. What came instead was grief with the skin off, because I looked at that lit-up face and I remembered when I lit up over the same man.
She drove four hours when my father died.
Penny Wexford dropped everything, drove four hours in the rain, held my hand through the funeral, filled my freezer with food I never saw her cook, and slept in the spare room for three nights because she didn't like how quiet I'd gone.
That happened. That was real, I refuse to believe it wasn't, and the woman who did it was sitting across a burrata from me wearing stolen diamonds and rehearsing my replacement, and both of those women were her, and I will never fully get my head around it as long as I live.
"More coffee?" the waiter asked.
"More wine. We're celebrating," Penny told him. "It's almost my birthday."
I made it through dessert. I helped her rank three caterers and talked her out of a champagne tower, laughing in all the right places while the low cold room absorbed it all, and when we hugged goodbye on the sidewalk she held on an extra second and said into my hair, "I'm so glad I have you," and I said, "Always," into hers, and neither of us let the other see our face.
In the car I gripped the wheel at ten and two and shook for a while.
I'd learned to let the body do its thing and pass through, so I sat in a parking lot on Greenwich Avenue and let it, teeth chattering in July, and when it finished I dried my eyes with the heels of my hands, and there was Chris's handkerchief in my bag, pressed and square, and the sight of it steadied me more than using it would have.
I texted him. Lunch with P. She was wearing my anniversary earrings. She asked me to plan the party. Seating, schedule, all of it. I said yes.
The reply came slowly, and I watched the dots pause and resume, pause and resume, and pictured him at the drafting table making the machine take dictation.
Good. The general who is handed the map of the battlefield by the other side should say thank you and study the map. Are you all right? That is not a strategy question.
I sat with that last line for a moment. No, I typed, because it was true and because Chris had made a place where true was allowed. But I will be. She let something slip. She thinks this is her last birthday in her old life.
Then we agree on something, Chris wrote. It is.
I put the phone down and started the car, and caught my own eyes in the mirror, and they were dry and clear and a little frightening, and I drove home to make dinner for my husband with the seating chart of his ruin already sketching itself in my head.
She wanted the toasts early. Fine.
Early it would be.