All You Could Ask For: A Novel (37 page)

I FINALLY DID IT.

I have been meaning for the longest time to begin memorizing quotes and who said them. I love to read, and I have promised myself I will begin to do what I know other people do, underlining meaningful passages, phrases, posting them as notes on my refrigerator or bathroom mirror, or as reminders on my iPad.

Well, I’ve begun.

The idea came to me last night, during dinner with my husband and the twins and a dear friend of the family, a darling young girl named Ashley, who grew up on our street and used to babysit for my kids before she went off to college. She is twenty-one now, and home to see her parents, and she always stops for a visit with us, and last night she sat down to a heaping plate of macaroni and cheese with steamed broccoli on the side and laughed about wonderful memories we all share.

She first babysat for us when the twins were just a year old, and she always tells them stories of how cute they were, which we all love, and the kids especially never tire of hearing of the night Megan had projectile diarrhea that grazed Ashley’s hair and splattered against the wall four feet behind her. Both kids, even now, at eight, practically fall out of their chairs at that one.

Ashley has blossomed into such a lovely young woman, poised and pretty. I view her with a degree of pride and I know Scott does as well. We both remember her when she was hardly older than the twins are now, walking up our driveway with a tray of brownies she and her mother had baked to welcome us to the neighborhood. It was our first house, and right away she made it feel like a home. When the twins came four years later, Ashley became a fixture; I cried at her high school graduation.

Anyway, we were all having the most wonderful time when Jared began to reminisce about a night none of us had ever heard about, even his sister. He remembered Ashley’s high school boyfriend, a shy kid named Eric, who frequently visited while she babysat. Scott and I were perfectly comfortable with that so long as her parents were, and they were; Eric was a sweet boy and he liked to play with our kids and when the twins were in bed he and Ashley would sit on our couch and watch television until Scott and I came home. It was all very innocent and sweet.

Well, last night over dinner Jared told us of a night, back in the days of Eric, when he awoke during the night with an upset stomach and came downstairs and saw Eric and Ashley kissing! Oh, the horror of it, he told us, as he is still of an age where he finds kissing to be repulsive, as does his sister. Scott and I roared with wine-infused laughter, and Megan made a funny face to indicate how gross the kissing must have been, and it was all very funny. Except that Ashley wasn’t laughing.

“Jared,” she said, turning a bit red, “I don’t remember that happening. You must have dreamt it.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head for emphasis, “I was awake. I remember. You were kissing!”

And then Megan was out of her chair and mimicking a make-out session, her arms wrapped dramatically around her own sides, making smooching sounds loud enough to startle the dog.

Scott, who had managed to get his laughter under control, looked over at Jared. “Was
that
how it looked when Ashley and Eric were kissing?”

“Well, sort of,” Jared said, his attention back to his macaroni, “only they weren’t wearing clothes.”

The words hung in the air for an instant. Scott immediately took an enormous gulp of his Pinot Noir and glanced quickly at Ashley, who was now bright red, her lips parting, no doubt to futilely insist Jared had dreamt or imagined the entire event, but before she could say a word the silence was broken by Megan, who started dancing uncontrollably about the room, smooching and laughing so hard she fell to the ground, where she continued to writhe with laughter and scream, “KISSING NAKED! KISSING NAKED!”

“Jared,”
Ashley said, because she had to protest even though it was obviously true, “you are making this up. That’s not nice.”

“No,” he said matter-of-factly, “I saw your boobies.”

That was more than Megan could take.

“SAW YOUR BOOBIES! SAW YOUR BOOBIES!”

Tears were streaming down her cheeks as she rolled about the kitchen floor, howling in that combination of humor and wonder of which only children are capable. She knew it was funny and she knew it was awkward, and she knew there was something about it all that wasn’t right but she didn’t really know what, or why. So the most she could do was make noise and she did that for all she was worth until Scott finally stopped it.

“That’s enough.”

He didn’t shout, he almost never does, he just has a certain tone in his voice that makes it clear he is not making a request, he is making a demand. It is a tone I like a lot; I have heard it used in many settings that do not involve macaroni and cheese. Megan quickly got back in her seat and resumed eating, and Jared drank his milk, and I poured more wine into my glass and Ashley’s and I took a long sip. And it was all quiet, aside from the clanking of the silverware, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at Ashley’s face for fear of how horrified she must have been.

And then Scott started to laugh. It was a quiet laugh at first, under his breath, as though he knew it was something he shouldn’t find funny, but he did. And so did I. And as Scott began to allow himself to laugh, I did too, and soon we were both laughing hard, and the kids were too, even though they had no idea why, they will just laugh pretty much any time they can find a good excuse to. And I got up and walked around the table to stand behind Ashley and put my arms around her and squeezed tight, and to my great joy she began to laugh as well, and so we sat there, enjoying a bottle of wine, or a glass of milk, and most of all enjoying each other, my husband and my son and my daughter and their former babysitter and me, and there was so much love in the room it hung in the air like mist on a spring morning.

And so today, after I kissed my husband good-bye and got my kids off to school, I sat down at my computer and found the quote I remembered from college. It is from the play
Faust,
by Goethe, which I didn’t enjoy at all when I read it back then, but I’ve always remembered the concept: a man makes a deal with the devil; he offers his soul in exchange for a single moment of perfection, one moment where he feels whole and complete happiness.

The quote didn’t take long to find.

If ever I to the moment shall say:
Beautiful moment, do not pass away!
Then you may forge your chains to bind me,
Then I will put my life behind me.

I printed it out and I am going to laminate the words and keep them with me. Maybe I’ll hang them on the fridge. And they won’t be the only ones. This is just the beginning. There will be other quotes, other ideas, other people who have understood me without ever meeting me, other words and phrases I will be able to summon when I need them, perhaps in church, or at a dinner party, or to impart a lesson to my kids. I can use them when I argue with Samantha about the decisions I have made, or when I am alone in the bath and questioning them myself. It just feels good to know that there are people out there who can use words better than I can to explain my life. Not that it needs to be explained, if you ask me. But it still feels good.

SAMANTHA

Seven months later

SEVEN O’CLOCK IS SUCH a lively time of the morning out here.

Up early on this Sunday to check e-mail and I hardly even mind it, didn’t need to set an alarm, even as hard as I’ve been working since we started. Something in the salty fresh air of the ocean feels so familiar, so invigorating, it makes my mind feel sharp. In the bustle of the city, I tend to wake with a foggy brain no matter how much I’ve slept. But here at the beach I feel focused and rested, even after all the wine last night, and the midnight skinny-dipping.

The house is just sensational, everything Katherine told me and more. Drinking coffee now in the kitchen I can feel the warmth of the sun as it slips between the vanishing clouds and climbs above the ocean. I can hear gulls squawking in the surf as they dive after whatever washed ashore during the night. Up the way the surfers are arriving en masse. I see three of them on the water but there must be twenty more on the beach, pulling on wetsuits; the morning is chilly, probably no more than sixty degrees out there now, going to seventy after breakfast.

Katherine left filled closets behind; I am in a silver dressing robe of soft flannel, which is hers, over silk pajamas, which are my own. I don’t like to wear her clothes, here or in the city, but now and again I make an exception. This morning it felt just right, luxurious and decadent, like a fudge sundae.

There are more than seventy e-mails waiting for me when I log in. I need to hire more staff. This endeavor has become bigger than Katherine or I dreamt it might, which is remarkable, considering how ambitious we both were from the outset. But it has become clear to me now that I need more help. Seventy is too many messages for a Sunday morning, especially one as pretty and serene as this. I would love to hire Marie, but she is due any day and the sense I get when I speak with her is that her working days are behind her. We’ll see after the baby comes and she settles in, perhaps she’ll change her mind, but I’m not going to count on it. She seems quite content. I won’t push her, but I will ask again.

I’ve never been more impressed by any person in all my life than I am by Marie. What she did, and the way she did it, constitutes the single most dynamic act of courage and love that I have ever witnessed. I told Katherine that I had nothing to do with it and that I knew nothing of it, and both of those were true, whether Katherine believed it or not. I made her a promise that I would not interfere when it came to Stephen and there is no way I would ever have disregarded my word to her.

I found out about it the same time Katherine did, the night of the wedding, when Maurice pulled the car into the driveway in front of my building and I found, to my surprise, that Marie was inside and Katherine was not. When Maurice came around to open the door for me, I gave him a questioning look.

“Hop in,” he said. “I’m sure she’ll explain.”

The
she
he meant was Marie, not Katherine, and she did explain, right then and there, sitting in her wedding gown while the car idled in the driveway and the last of the sunlight peeked through the open window.

“I’ve done something really big,” she said. She was trembling with excitement, her hands shaking so hard she could hardly take a sip from the bottle of water she held. “I think it might be the best thing I’ve ever done. I hope so. I really, really hope so.”

She just kept saying that, over and over, staring into the distance. The sounds of a New York City Saturday night were all around us.

“Marie,” I said, “where is Katherine?”

She broke into a smile at that, so wide it spread to us all. There was such electricity in her face it made me tingle, and while I hadn’t yet heard exactly what it was, I knew right then she was right, it was the biggest thing she’d ever done.

And so she took a deep breath and she told us.

She told us about the first time Stephen called the office looking for Katherine. Marie did as she was told, explained that Katherine had resigned and left no forwarding information. The second time he called, the following day, she did the same. The third time, when he tried to disguise his voice and used a phony name, clumsy and nervous, Marie had tears in her eyes as she sent him away.

The following day, he didn’t call, nor the day after that. And as the days passed, and Marie didn’t have to turn away his calls, the ache in the pit of her stomach grew. It grew and grew until it grew into a memory, began to feel as though it had been in a dream, or another life. Which, in a way, she said, it sort of had.

And then a month passed and she had given up that dream and settled into the rhythm of caring for Katherine, and tending to her job, and contemplating her future, when on the third Thursday after her period nothing happened. This was unprecedented; Marie was as regular as you could be, she had never been even a day late since she was seventeen. And she knew immediately she was pregnant, knew for sure, even before the drugstore and the powder-blue tip and the week that passed before she said a word to her doctor or her fiancé. When she finally told Adam, they agreed they would be married as quickly as was feasible. They wouldn’t have a big, glamorous wedding, they both knew that, because his family thought she was a gold-digger and her family thought his family was pretentious, and there was just no need to deal with any of that. So they got into bed and made love more passionately than Marie could ever remember, and then they lay in the dark and drank sparkling apple cider out of champagne flutes and fantasized about what they would do for a wedding if their options were unlimited.

“I would have Bruce Springsteen walk you down the aisle, shake my hand, and then play ‘Born to Run’ on a harmonica,” he said.

“I would have us go up in a hot-air balloon and we could recite our vows as we watch the sun rise,” she said.

“I actually like that,” Adam said, and then he paused to think a minute. “You know, we could do that if we wanted to. Where would we do it?”