All You Could Ask For: A Novel (30 page)

I pressed down the intercom button. “Ask her what she left behind, I’ll send it down in the elevator.”

There was a brief pause before my doorman spoke. “No, ma’am, actually, your visitor is a gentleman. He says to tell you his name is Phillip, and that you’d remember him from school.”

BROOKE

I SENT SAMANTHA AN e-mail because I wanted to meet her.

Running into a man I know she once loved gave me the perfect opportunity, but I would have found another reason anyway. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to see her. I wanted to see what she looked like, hear how she sounded. It’s a strange world we live in now where we can have relationships with people without ever seeing their faces and hearing their voices: it’s as though they aren’t real, just characters in a book and you can envision them any way you like. But Samantha was real and I knew that and I always knew I would reach out to her. It would have been unfair not to.

Besides, Dr. Marks is a total babe and he’s smart and seems to be sensitive. He’s a pediatrician, for crying out loud; how can you be
that
without being sensitive? He is exactly the sort of man I might have fallen in love with, even though he is so different from the man I married. Scott is all swagger, Dr. Marks is all sweet. And I
love
the swagger, but every now and again I think we could all use a little bit of the sweet, too.

He was loading up a latte with sugar and cinnamon when I saw him.

“Is everything all right with you?” he asked.

It took me a moment to realize what he was referring to. I had forgotten it was he who had initially made me promise to get my first mammogram, who had unwittingly begun what amounted to the worst experience of my life. I had forgotten, but apparently he had not, and as much as I didn’t like to be reminded, his remembering made me crush on him just a little bit more.

“I am
fine,
” I said, “thank you.”

“I’m glad,” he said, and he smiled. “You can’t be too careful.”

“I totally agree,” I said, and then I changed the subject.

I could see from the look on his face at the mention of her name that he had feelings for Samantha. I told him I’d come into contact (“a friend of a friend of a friend”) with a girl who mentioned she had known him growing up. His right eye narrowed when I said her name, and he smiled using half his face. That’s the way some memories work, I think. Some make you laugh, others make you cry, and the really good ones make half your face smile.

Now, after a handful of disasters, I have mostly given up on fix-ups, but this was too easy and it gave me the entrée I needed to invite Samantha to lunch, which I’d wanted to do for some time.

I’ll meet you in the city
, I wrote to her.
You name the spot
.

I couldn’t have her to Greenwich. There isn’t anyone in this town I don’t know, and I wasn’t interested in answering questions about how Samantha and I had come to meet.

You see, I haven’t told anyone about my problem. Not my husband or my children, and certainly not all the women in town who live to mind one another’s business. I don’t really want to talk about
why
I haven’t said anything; in fact, I don’t want to talk about any of it at all. I have managed to hardly even think about it, to be honest. In all these weeks there was only one time that I broke down, at a dinner party at the home of our friends, the Robertsons; he’s a pompous hedge-fund guy and she’s an unapologetic trophy wife, but they throw lovely parties and I was having a good time until one of the guests, a tipsy blonde named Emily, suggested a topic over dinner.

“For all the husbands at the table,” she said aloud, “and then we’ll do the wives after, here’s the question . . .”

She paused, with an evil twinkle in her eye, as though she was about to say something so provocative the room would explode before she was through.

“If your wife were to die tomorrow,” she said, glass raised as though she were making a toast, “would you get remarried?”

To my horror, there was a murmur in the room as though everyone found the question to be suitable dinner conversation.

“I heard them talking about it on one of the
Housewives
shows,” Emily went on, “and I just thought it was so damned interesting!”

I didn’t.

I didn’t find it interesting. I wasn’t interested in answering, I wasn’t interested in hearing anyone else’s answer, and I
certainly
didn’t want to hear what my husband had to say.

I waited an appropriate amount of time before excusing myself to the bathroom, where I waited for what felt like an hour for someone to become concerned. It was Scott who finally tapped on the door.

“Baby, everything all right?” he asked.

“I’m sick,” I whispered, hoarsely and fast. “I need to go home.”

Through all of this, that was the only time I ever told Scott I was sick. He took me home and helped me up the stairs, and I assured him I would be all right, that I just needed a bit of privacy, and he went downstairs to make a sandwich and open a beer, and soon I heard the sound of a baseball game from the television in the family room, and everything was normal again, just the way I like it.

So, I’ve said nothing. And I plan to keep it that way.

Samantha chose to meet me at a restaurant called Michael’s. She said it was a place she has had good luck in the past.

I’m all for good luck
, I wrote her, and we met at noon on a Thursday.

She looked exactly as I pictured her: Ivory-girl skin and athletic, pretty in a natural, effortless way. You can never guess exactly what a person is going to look like, but you can predict a few things about their appearance, and in this case I got all of them right.

I had practiced the speech during the ride down from Connecticut. “I just want to start by saying thank you,” I said, when we first sat down after an awkward hug. “It was very sweet of you to show such concern for me. The least I can do is buy you lunch, so I insist you allow me to pay, and then if you end up marrying Dr. Marks you have to invite me to the wedding.”

Samantha had an adorable little smile that just curled the corners of her lips. It seemed to me that her memory of him struck her in exactly the same way his memory of her struck him. All these years later and they’re still a little bit in love with each other.

“I’ll allow you to pay for lunch,” she said, “and we’ll see about Andrew Marks later, but first I need to know how you are doing.”

“I am doing great,” I said. “I’m wonderful. I feel healthy and happy and strong. I have my life back exactly as I want it and I’m not allowing myself to worry about things I can’t control, so let’s talk about other things.”

I didn’t expect her to be satisfied with that response. I just needed to put it out there so that when I
really
couldn’t talk about it anymore I could repeat it.

“Okay,” she said breezily, “I’m fine with that. You know I want to know and I want to help you any way I can. But I’m not going to beg you. If you want to talk about other things, that’s fine with me.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Let’s talk about your old boyfriend.”

“Let’s have a drink before we do that.”

So we did. We had each finished a glass of wine and ordered seconds before we dug in.

“How in the world is it that this terrific man, whom every girl had a crush on in school, can be single after all these years?” Samantha asked. “One of two things must be going on. Either he is a total womanizer or he’s insane.”

I stifled a hiccup. “He could be gay.”

“That isn’t better,” she said.

“Well, I’m not saying he is. Maybe he’s sexually confused.”

“Are you trying to make a match or to make me run in the opposite direction?”

I laughed. “I’ve seen the way you look when I mention his name,” I said. “You aren’t running anywhere and we both know it. Do you want me to give him your number or your e-mail?”

“Can’t I call
him
?”

“Oh no,” I told her. “I don’t advise that at all.”

“Why not?”

“You’re much too cute for that. Let
him
pursue
you
.”

Samantha set her glass down and looked at me seriously. “You have a lot of beliefs that I find very unusual,” she told me. “They seem like they would come from a much older woman.”

“They do,” I said. “From my grandmother, and my mother as well, both of whom always told me the most fun part of being a woman is
being
a woman. My grammy used to say, ‘These rules seemed to serve just fine for thousands of years.’ Of course, she didn’t believe a woman should wear pants, either, so I took some of it with a grain of salt, but for the most part the message was received, and I’m not ashamed of it, no matter how dated it all may seem.”

Samantha raised her glass to her lips and just let it sit. “It’s funny,” she said. “If I had never met you and just saw you, I would guess you were my age. If I had never seen you but just heard you talk, I would guess you were my mother’s age. And the truth is you’re actually directly in between.”

“Forty years old and not the least bit ashamed of it.”

Samantha seemed to think a minute. “Forty years old and raised in Greenwich, I’ll bet you know someone I just recently met. Her name is Katherine Emerson.”

“Absolutely,” I said. I remembered her. “She was a year ahead of me in school. We were friendly when we were young but she pulled away as we got older.”

Samantha leaned closer, as though what I’d said had triggered something she’d been trying to remember. “You know, she talks about that sometimes. She says something bad happened with her father, but she hasn’t told me what it was.”

“I know what it was,” I said. “The whole town knew.”

Samantha just stared. I knew I would tell her, there wasn’t any reason to keep it secret, but I wanted to make her ask me. It was clear in her eyes she was desperate to know. I’m not sure why this lunch had become such a power struggle, but it had.

“How well do you know her?” I asked.

“I know her very well and at the same time I hardly know her at all,” Samantha said. “I met her the same way I met you.”

That, right there, stopped all this from being fun.

“Is she going to be all right?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Samantha said. “And I don’t want to violate her privacy about her father, but if it’s something everyone knew perhaps you could just tell me.”

I couldn’t see any reason to play games with this. “Her father went to jail when we were about twelve years old. I believe it was business related, not murder or anything, tax evasion or something. But he went away and then he got sick while he was in prison and never came home and Katherine was never the same after that. She was a really smart girl, as I remember, but I always assumed she hadn’t recovered from what happened to her family.”

“She hasn’t,” Samantha said.

“So she hasn’t done well?”

Samantha paused. “She’s incredibly successful, very wealthy. She lives a very glamorous lifestyle, but she hasn’t done well, not in any way that really matters.”

Then Samantha raised her hand and asked the waiter to come over, and asked him for a pen and paper. When he brought them, she scribbled something quickly and handed the paper to me.

“Thanks for lunch,” she said. “Let’s do it again soon. That’s my number, ask Andrew to call me.”

And she was up and gone, just like that.

KATHERINE