Apart at the Seams (18 page)

I looked down into the beige pond of my latte, the foam down to just a few bubbles around the edges of the cup. He'd been flirting with me that day? Trying his hardest to get my attention? So hard that he would be willing to use my kids as a means of getting close to me?

It had been one thing to be gullible and a terrible judge of character when I was the only one who could get hurt, but now I had kids. I didn't want to be suspicious of everyone I met, and Dan seemed like a good-hearted guy, but still, I had to be careful.

“Even though you weren't interested in me, I'm glad I went outside to talk with you,” he continued. “Bobby's a great kid.”

“You know, you don't have to take him bowling again . . .” I stopped myself, thinking how rude that sounded. “I mean, not if you don't want to. I'm sure you've got better things to do with your time.”

“Not really. Drew is so busy with school and work and girls these days that I practically have to make an appointment to see him. Seems like yesterday that he was Bobby's age. I miss having a little guy around. Seriously, I don't mind.” He smiled. “I'm having as much fun as Bobby is.”

I studied his expression, trying to figure out if he was sincere or just trying to win me over by complimenting my son, but there were no telltale signs, no shifting of the eyes or twitching of the lips. He looked like he always did, honest and open and really, really cute, even more than he had before.

“Can I ask you something? Does Bobby talk about his dad when he's out with you?”

Dan nodded. “Uh-huh. He's pretty excited to see him, says his dad is going to bring him a macaw from China.”

“A macaw? One of those big parrots?” I closed my eyes for a moment and groaned in frustration. “Where does he get these ideas? I explained to him that Hodge has been in prison, not the navy. Why does he keep making up these stories?”

“Well,” Dan said, wrapping his hands around his cup, “if I were Bobby's age and I had to choose between believing my father was a felon or believing he was a sailor, I'd pick sailor. It can't be easy for him.”

“No,” I murmured. “You're right. I just wish I knew how much to tell him about his dad. I don't want to sugarcoat it, but at the same time, I don't want to go into any more of the sordid details than I have to.”

Dan was quiet for a moment and then took a sip of his coffee. “Are you asking my advice?”

I nodded. I guess I was.

“Keep on doing what you've been doing. Tell him the truth about his dad but not any more than he needs to know. Keep Bobby safe, but give him a chance to get to know his father again. Who knows? Maybe five years in prison really has reformed your ex. Maybe he's changed his ways and truly is ready to be a good father. If so—great. If not, he'll reveal his true nature soon enough. Bobby will pick up on it. He's a smart boy, and sooner or later, people always show you who they really are. You just have to watch and wait.”

Easier said than done, especially if you're the one doing the watching, but I knew good advice when I heard it. I was about to tell Dan exactly that when Mandy appeared out of nowhere and blew her whistle.

“Okay! Last round!”

Dan smiled and shifted in his chair, but without thinking, I reached out and grabbed his hand. “Don't go,” I said.

“Okay,” he replied, looking pleased but surprised.

Mandy was surprised, too, but looked far from pleased as she approached our table.

“I'm sorry, sixty-two,” she said, forcing a smile, “but you'll have to get up now and go to your next date, okay? There are lots of interesting people to meet tonight. I'd hate for you to miss out.”

Dan glanced up at her and then at me. “Thanks, but I've already met the most interesting person in the room. Think I'll just stay where I am.”

“Ha-ha,” Mandy laughed nervously. “Well, I'm glad you met someone you're interested in, but really, you have to move on now. Those are the rules. I'm sure number twenty-three's next date will be here any second.”

Sure enough, just at that moment, my fifth and final date of the evening did show up.

“Hello. I am Sergei,” he said, grinning widely. “I date you.”

I grabbed his outstretched hand and said, “Oh, Sergei. It's nice to meet you, but I was wondering if you'd mind dating someone else for this last round. You see, Dan and I would like to talk a little more . . .”

His grin faded a bit. “Hello. I am Sergei. I date you,” he repeated, and then started jabbering in another language, probably Russian, but I honestly couldn't be sure.

Dan got up from the table. “Maybe we should go somewhere else to finish our conversation. Can I take you out for coffee? There's a diner a couple of blocks from here.”

“Can we make it a milk shake instead? Coffee keeps me up at night.”

“Okay,” Dan said, and helped me to my feet.

“No!” Mandy shouted. “Not okay! I explained to everyone at the start of the evening that you had to move on to your next date when the whistle blew, that you had to go through all the numbers on your list. No lingering! Those are the rules!”

Dan held out my jacket while I slipped my arms through the sleeves. “Uh-huh. Well, I got here late, so I never heard about that part. And I've never been much of a rule follower anyway. Good night, Mandy. Thanks for a great evening.

“Sergei,” he said, handing a piece of yellow paper over to the other man, who was glaring at Mandy and babbling away in Russian, “take my list. Who knows? Fourteen might turn out to be your lucky number.”

I
still had my doubts about this whole dating thing and about putting off any decisions about divorce until the end of the summer, but that's what I'd agreed to, so I decided that if I was going to do it, I might as well do it right.

On Saturday morning I went to Kaplan's boutique in search of a dress. Almost every dress I own—all of which were still sitting in my closet in the city—is black, but when I spotted a turquoise and green checked shirt dress on the rack, I decided to try it on. Very Connecticut, I thought. If only it had come with pearls and a matching cardigan, I'd really look the part. It was definitely a departure from my usual, but it looked good on me, so I bought it.

Brian liked it. That's what he said when I opened the door that evening. Brian looked very nice, too, dressed in the Irish linen sports coat he knows I like and a blue button-down with an open collar. He smiled in response to my compliment and then, after a momentary pause, said we should probably get going.

The drive from the cottage to the restaurant was awkward. We were both on our best behavior. Brian even jumped out of the car when we parked and ran around the other side to open my door for me. It really did feel like we were on a date, a first date. Except that on our real first date, we'd had no trouble talking to each other. We'd been fascinated with each other, firing question after question, responding without the least attempt to filter our answers, eager to learn absolutely everything possible about each other, feeling no hesitancy about sharing our most carefully guarded hopes and most outlandish dreams.

Now, of course, we knew how the story turned out. We knew that desire, however deeply held, isn't always enough. That hopes are often dashed. And that life is hard. We knew about disappointment and apathy, broken promises and failures. But we didn't talk about that because it was a date and we were being polite. So very polite. So very well behaved.

Anyway, what was the point of going over old ground? Or, as I started to think by the time the salad arrived, of talking at all. We already knew everything about each other. What more was there to say?

But Brian had an idea—actually, more of an agenda.

“Listen, Gayla. I was reading this book about . . . Well, about how to save a marriage in crisis, and I came across something I think we might want to try. It sounds a bit . . . um, touchy-feely,” he said, pushing his fingers into his hair. “The sort of thing my father would utterly have disapproved of, so naturally, I thought it well worth a try.”

I smiled. I wouldn't want to speak ill of the dead, and I met Brian's father only once, on the very formal and uneasy occasion of our postnuptial tea, but I had to agree with Brian. Any communication technique that Arthur Oliver would have disapproved of was probably a good idea.

And hearing that Brian was concerned enough about saving our marriage to actually read “touchy-feely” books on the subject impressed me. Lanie, of course, would have told me that it was just another piece of maneuvering on his part, another deception, but I didn't think so. Saying he was sorry was easy enough. People say they're sorry all the time, even when what they really mean is that they're sorry they got caught, or sorry that they're being put in a situation where they've been forced to apologize. Apologies cost nothing. But taking responsibility for your actions comes at a price. It's not about what you say; it's about what you do.

Brian was here. He was trying. I had to give him points for that. I put one elbow on the table and rested my chin in my hand. It was my listening posture. I wanted him to know he had my full attention.

“Here's how it works. You'll talk, and I'll listen. Wait,” he said, holding up his hand to interrupt my forthcoming interruption. “There's more to it. You talk about your life from birth through age five—anything that comes to mind at all—for twenty minutes. And I listen. I don't comment or ask questions until you're finished. And then we trade sides and repeat the process—I'll talk and you listen. What do you think?”

“You want me to talk about my life up until I was five? For twenty minutes?”

He had to be kidding. My memories of my first five years of life wouldn't take two minutes to tell. I was born, my family lived in New Jersey, my father worked at a job he hated, my mother was bitter, and they fought constantly, agreeing about only two things: that life had cheated them and that I should grow up and go to Princeton. That was it—the first five years of my life. The rest of my growing-up years were pretty similar. Brian knew all that already. What was the point in repeating it?

“I know, I know,” he said. “I'm as skeptical as you are, but I was talking to Ian about it and he says that it works. When he and Pamela were having some problems, their therapist recommended they get the book and work through some of the techniques on their own. He said they were very effective.”

“You talked to Ian?”

That surprised me. It really did. Ian and Brian had been rivals back in their days at Harrow. When Ian left England and moved to New York, married well, and found a high-paying job on Wall Street, the two men, bound by a common history and nationality, became friends—of a sort. Every time we went to dinner with Ian and Pamela, which, thankfully, wasn't more than twice a year, the men spent most of the evening engaged in a quiet and very British game of one-upsmanship, subtly dropping names and hinting at their accomplishments. But they never, ever discussed their failures or fears. It was hard to imagine Brian allowing Ian to see a chink in his armor. Almost as hard as it was to imagine him canceling his travel for a month.

He
was
trying. He truly was.

“You told Ian about us? That I'm living up here?”

“I didn't go into specifics,” Brian assured me. “I simply told him we were having some marital issues. A few years back, when we went to that party at his house to watch the World Cup final and he'd had a few too many, I remembered him saying something about he and Pamela having gone to a marriage counselor, so I just asked him if he knew of anyone good. That's all. It's not like we're the only people on earth who have problems, you know.” Brian stared at his plate, separating the croutons from the salad and shoving them to one side.

“I know,” I said, taking a sip from my wineglass. “I was just surprised to hear you'd spoken to him.”

“Well.” Brian shrugged. “I figured it was worth asking. He said he could give me the name of the therapist if I wanted but thought that working through the book might do us just as well. And be far less expensive.”

“Ah, yes.” I smiled. “Trust Ian to think of that.”

“Right. Have you noticed that people who bring down seven-figure annual bonuses doing nothing terribly useful are the first to whinge about the exorbitant salaries of the lesser mortals?” Brian speared a lettuce leaf. “All the same. It can't hurt to try. Shall we? Ladies first.”

I took off my watch, making a joke about not wanting to go beyond my time, and laid it on the table near my empty plate. And then, after lifting my glass to my lips and taking a final swallow of wine—a swallow, not a sip—I started talking.

I began, as I always did when anyone asked about my childhood, with the Princeton Tigers pennant that my parents hung on the nursery wall even before I was born. That pennant is part of our family apocrypha, a story that my parents told regularly, a symbol of their unshakable faith in my intelligence and promise. It wasn't until my late twenties that I realized the story was less about me than them, that what it really represented was their personal determination as parents and individuals, the weight of their expectations, and their absolute need to make their lives count for something.

Why Princeton? I honestly don't know. Except that it was located in New Jersey and that the president of the company where my father worked for thirty-eight years, years that never saw him rise above the ranks of lower-middle management, had sent his son there.

“See that?” he said, pointing to the television screen when I was about four, as we watched a montage of campus buildings during a sportscast about a recent Princeton football victory. “That's where the bigwigs go to school. That's where you're going.”

I knew that, of course. I had always known that. And I was on board with it. I wanted to be a bigwig. Who wouldn't? And I wanted to make my parents proud.

I told the rest of the story, about my parents' arguments, about my mother's resentment about the size of their house and the fact that it was a “man's world,” and about the time she made me solemnly promise never to learn how to type because if I did, I would spend the rest of my life doing it. I told him all of it, though he'd heard it all many years before. But my memories weren't all bad, and my parents weren't always unhappy.

I told him about summer vacations in Atlantic City, riding the roller coaster on the boardwalk with my mother five times in one day, and how she had insisted that we ride in the front car and told the operator we would stand aside and wait for the next run so we could have our preferred spot.

I told him about our Christmases—my parents loved Christmas—and how Dad would drive eighty miles to the same tree farm in Pennsylvania year after year, cutting the tree himself, the biggest he could find, so big we had to set it up in the foyer of our little Victorian house, because that was the only room tall enough. I told him how we had to stand on ladders or climb the stairs and hang over the banisters to get the decorations on the upper branches.

And I told him about the huge storm when I was five, the one that dumped close to three feet of snow in less than a day and knocked out power to the whole town. I told him about how Dad had pulled the sofas close around the fireplace and then hung quilts and blankets behind them, using pushpins to suspend them from the ceiling, making a kind of fabric den to keep the heat in, and how we had lived in that little den for most of the three days that followed, playing board games, reading aloud, cooking hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks over the fire, pretending we were camping, and how my parents had not had one fight during that entire time—not one! And how I had opened my eyes one night, stirring momentarily from sleep, and seen my father and mother lying together in front of the fireplace under a blanket, nested together like silver spoons wrapped in felt, staring into the flames, and how my father had stroked her arm with his hand, up and down, over and over again, very gently, and pressed his lips into her hair, kissing the crown of her head.

“You never told me that story before,” Brian said when I was finished.

“Didn't I? Maybe not. I haven't thought about it for a long time.”

We talked a little more about my childhood, about why my parents had waited so long to have me, and why there were no other children after me. I didn't know the answers. I assumed that my status as an only child had something to do with my parents' ages—Mother was thirty-three when I was born—but who knew? These things were not openly discussed in our home.

It was the same for Brian, I knew. Though when it came to taboo subjects in the Oliver household, fertility and sex were just the tip of the iceberg.

“Basically, we didn't talk about anything personal. It was acceptable to discuss what you'd done but not how you felt about it. Weather was always the first topic of discussion. I can't think why,” he said in a bemused tone, “there was so little to discuss. It was always either raining or threatening rain. While you were sunbathing on the Jersey shore and riding roller coasters with your mother, my brother and I took ‘bracing' walks in the rain with Father, who would share his observations about how exposure to warm climates led to indolence and widespread social decline. He had a theory that access to inexpensive transportation, the ability of ordinary people to go on holiday abroad to places like Spain and Italy, marked the beginning of the decline of the British Empire.”

“Wait a minute.” I laughed. “Vacations in sunny Spain brought down the empire? What about all those incursions into other continents? The whole colonization thing? India has a pretty hot climate, too, you know. So does Africa.”

Brian shook his head, feigning seriousness. “Different situation entirely. The people who went to India and Africa were soldiers, disciplined, driven by duty.”

“Ah. I see. But what about—”

Brian leaned across the table. “You're not following the rules,” he informed me. “No questions until I'm finished.”

“Sorry.”

“Right. Now, where was I?” he asked, nudging his wineglass to the edge of the table, making it easier for our waitress, who had appeared from nowhere, to refill it. “Oh, yes. According to Arthur, the sight of all those happy people lolling about in cafés on a fine Mediterranean afternoon, instead of spending their days nose to the grindstone, bred dissatisfaction among the working classes and was directly related to the rise of socialism.”

Brian paused, taking a test sip from his newly filled glass. I lifted my hand to a spot near my ear, as if asking for permission to speak, though I didn't wait for it to be granted. “Hold on. These were the discussions you had with your father between birth and age five? Now who's breaking the rules?”

“Point taken,” he said, setting down his glass. “I don't remember when he first started discussing his theories with us, but probably not as early as that. Though he may have. The point I was trying to make is that it was permissible to talk about externals, like the weather, or sport, or world affairs—as long as it wasn't too controversial—or history. Especially the history of the Oliver family—the more ancient, the better, since we'd seen our peak well before the Protestant Reformation. But it wasn't acceptable to talk about ourselves or people we knew in anything but the most detached manner. And under no circumstances was it permissible to express or display strong emotion.