Epilogue
The exhibition opened on a Friday in spring and sold better than anything I’d hung in ten years.
Marek’s harbor canvas went in the first hour, to a collector who tried to negotiate and lost. By nine, I’d taken on two new artists, a ceramicist Diane had been hiding from me, and a young painter whose work made me stand still in the middle of my own event, which almost never happened anymore.
It was the entire reason I did this. I came home at midnight, put my shoes by the front door, and slept until eight in the morning.
Julie called twice a week, usually when she needed something, which I was told by mothers with older children was the correct and healthy amount.
She needed money for a spring formal dress, advice about a professor, my opinion on whether Selina’s new boyfriend was “a red flag or just from Ohio”.
She finished her first year with grades she pretended not to care about and forwarded me the moment they posted.
She ran a campus newsletter now, obviously.
She mentioned it in passing, weeks after the fact, the way she mentioned everything that mattered to her, and when I asked how it was going, she said:
“Circulation’s up forty percent. Turns out I have a gift for distribution.”
Neither of us commented on that, and we moved on.
News of Nick reached me secondhand and without consequence.
He rented an apartment in the city, one of those buildings with a lobby designed to look expensive to people who’d never had money, which was a sentence I got from Marnie and chose to keep.
His industry drew its own conclusions. The title he lost had not been replaced, and the ones he’d been offered since were the kind he’d have laughed at from the fiftieth floor.
He paid what the settlement said he paid, on time, because his attorney explained what happened if he didn’t.
Julie had dinner with him once a month in the city, her choice, her terms, and I’d never once asked what they talked about, and she’d never once needed me to.
He asked her at one of those dinners whether her mother ever mentioned him.
She told me she said no and watched him decide to take it as mercy, when we both knew it was inventory.
Olivia and I had no relationship. It was a simple fact, no heat behind it.
She was still in my parents’ guest room, three adults sealed in together with everything they refused to say out loud for forty years.
My mother had begun, in our monthly calls, to complain about her – small things, the car, the thermostat, a tone – then catch herself, remembering who she was talking to, at which point she changed the subject.
I let her change it. It wasn’t forgiveness.
It was just that I no longer needed her to admit what she knew, because everyone already knew it.
That had been the whole point of the newsletter, I’d decided, the real one, underneath the revenge: I was never going to convince anyone of anything ever again.
I was just going to show them, once, and let the truth do the rest, forever after.
On a bright Saturday, I played tennis with Carol, Dana, and Marnie, and lost the third set on purpose because Carol’s knee was taped, her serve was in, and some afternoons the score was not the score.
We took the corner table on the terrace after, the good one, under the awning, and the staff poured the drinks strong and kept them coming. We stayed for hours.
Nick came up once, briefly. Dana had heard from her husband that he’d been seen at some industry lunch, at a bad table, pitching somebody. Nobody lowered her voice. Nobody glanced at me to see if I could bear it.
“Who was the somebody?” asked Marnie.
Dana said she hadn’t asked.
“Imagine surviving the fall and then dying at a bad table,” Carol said.
Then we moved on, in the way of people for whom a thing was finished, to the trip.
The trip was real now. Five days on a coast in the fall, a rented house Dana had found with a terrace of its own, and we spent forty-five minutes arguing about rooms and who snored.
Marnie had a spreadsheet, because Marnie had a spreadsheet for everything, and my dates were already blocked around the charity exhibition I’d agreed to chair in October.
At some point, the sun started going down over the courts, and somebody’s mixed doubles turned into somebody’s argument on court two – marital, hissed, terribly audible. The four of us went quiet and listened without shame.
“Should we send wine down or a lawyer?” Carol asked.
I laughed so hard I had to put my glass on the table to keep from spilling it, sweaty, sunburned, not a year after my father had toasted my enduring marriage.
I looked around the table while they laughed. Carol, who’d parked outside my window with soup before noon. Dana, who’d cleared two guest lists in a morning and had never asked about the cologne. Marnie, who’d noticed things for years and finally said so out loud.
The club behind them, the courts below, all of it still mine. Nick had assumed I’d pack this life into a rented van and drive away from it, because that was what wives did. The wife left, the husband stayed, and the neighborhood politely moved on without her.
I stayed. It was the simplest sentence in this whole story, and the one I was proudest of.
He gambled the house, the family, the name, and the neighborhood on the theory that I’d never make a scene.
And he was almost right – I never did make a scene.
I made a plan, a recording, and a newsletter, and when the waiter came around again, I ordered another bottle for the table, because the evening was warm, the company was mine, and nobody had anywhere better to be.
I raised my glass to nothing official, and my friends raised theirs. We drank, we stayed, and we laughed until the sun was all the way down.
THE END