They walked in through the double doors and up the stairs. “You’re awfully quiet. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, I just . . . ,” his voice trailed off. “I actually just heard from my friend Wills. He and Liesel are getting married.”
Eden stopped in her tracks and turned to him.
“What? Are you joking? It’s been what, four or five months?”
“Well, I guess they were so close as friends already—through me—that they just got out the gate pretty quickly. It’s kind of surprising.”
They walked into Eden’s apartment and flicked on the lights.
“Are you okay?” she asked, taking his hand.
“Completely. Honestly, it’s strange, but I don’t feel anything other than total happiness for them. I think because I’m happy for myself, being with you.”
“Why is everyone getting married so young? I read the Styles section and I feel like they are getting younger and younger!”
“Life is short.” Chase shrugged. “Why not settle down? My parents got married at twenty-five.”
“Well, that’s totally different. That was another generation,” Eden said, rolling her eyes.
“Why?” Chase asked, confused. “In the scope of thousands and thousands of years, why should we get married later all of a sudden? It worked for millennia to marry young. Relative to the history of man, we practically just started marrying older two seconds ago.”
“Yeah, because they used to croak at forty!” Eden explained. “And if they didn’t, they were fucking miserable, at least most of them were. Wake up, Chase, it was about the dowry, not the pitter-patter of their beating hearts! It was about finding someone who had the most cattle and sheep or allowance per year, not the most in common.”
“You really think that?” Chase’s innocent cerulean eyes looked crushed.
Boy, was he ever young. Eden started to casually straighten up the living room, fluffing pillows and picking up wineglasses and bringing them to the kitchenette as Chase stood in the small foyer, waiting for an answer.
“It’s not my opinion, Chase. It’s fact.” Eden shrugged as she flurried around the house. “Marriages throughout history, across cultures, were often created by matchmakers, not chemistry. It wasn’t about love with angels singing and trumpets and shit. People were torn apart all the time because of what was advantageous. And they did what people do: They move on with their lives.”
Chase suddenly felt very far away from her, seeing up close Eden’s jaded side. While she was so loving and affectionate in bed, doting on and taking care of him, there was a side that seemed to fear real tenderness or emotion. Perhaps it was because she was scarred by Otto, or maybe she always just had to look out for herself and could never get too attached? Chase wasn’t sure what propelled her, or even what she wanted from life, but he knew one thing for certain: He was falling more and more madly in love with her.
Chase knew deep down he could get any girl he wanted, but he wanted Eden. In her he chose someone more sophisticated, more eloquent, sexier, worldlier. Not just a pretty girl looking to snag a husband, get prego, and push their blond tot up Madison in a Bugaboo. Chase knew that a life beside Eden was his dream—her sass, her edge, her independence, her badassness, all made her more alluring to him.
Chase watched her cut the stems of the flowers and arrange them in a vintage vase. The chasm between them, he realized, was far more than just years. Sadly, he sensed that her mind was beginning to wander to other places. In that moment, watching her fill her red teakettle with water, Chase began to worry that she would one day slip away from him, traveling away somewhere in that head of hers to a tableau far away. He wondered what she saw for herself, what future paintings of her life would look like. And if he would be in them beside her.
49
The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune.
—English proverb
E
den hardly fixated on Chase the way he did on her, but when they weren’t together for a night or two, she missed him. She missed his companionship, his passion for her, and the way he lovingly helped put the Humpty Dumpty of her shattered ego back together again. The truth was, while he made her feel more confident than ever, she also wondered what the fuck he was doing with her. During their days apart, she felt like an old aging hag, and when she saw him across a packed restaurant or theater or park path, Eden was struck all over again by his young skin, his smile, the charm that captivated every debutante up Fifth Avenue. He made her feel young again.
“Hi, gorgeous,” she said to him across the glowing hurricane lamp in an intimate café.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, kissing her cheek. “I was so excited to come and see you, I ran out of the office without my briefcase and had to go back.”
She reached over and took his hand in hers, tracing the tops of his fingers delicately.
“Chase, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this hand not clutching that tan case.”
“I know. It’s been intense lately,” he said, taking a breath, shaking his head. “Maybe I need a vacation. I mean, I go away with my family, but that’s not . . . really a break, you know? In a way it’s harder than work! I realized the other day that I haven’t taken a
real
vacation in forever.”
“What’s forever?” she wondered.
“Oh gosh, I don’t know. About four years.”
“Are you kidding me?” Eden asked, aghast.
“No, I wish I were,” he said, shrugging. He watched delightedly as Eden delved into her food with relish. “So many girls I’ve met are so self-conscious, they push around some sad salad and nurse a Diet Coke. You just dig right in and I love it,” Chase said lovingly, watching as she snarfed a generous plate of gnocchi. “You can tell just by watching you eat how much you love life.”
“Yeah, all that celery stick bullshit is for the rich,” she said, grinning as she stabbed a soft potato dumpling. “If you saw what I grew up eating, you’d get it. All these people? They have private chefs. I had Chef Boyardee.”
Chase looked at her across the hurricane-lamplit table.
“You know what I love about you? You appreciate everything,” he observed. “You’re not like these jaded women who’ve done it all, seen it all. You could have gotten sucked into your life with Otto but you’re still so grounded.”
“What’s not to appreciate? I mean, look at this! Delicious wine, delicious food—can you try this gnocchi, by the way? I swear, I’m ruined for this dish anywhere else. They may as well serve up a pile of pebbles with tomato sauce. These are so light and fluffy!”
Chase smiled to himself; her enthusiasm was almost childlike.
He stared at her starry-eyed and held her hand across the table. “Eden, I am crazy about you,” he said slowly.
Eden shifted in her seat. “I can’t thank you enough for catching me when I jumped ship from Otto,” she said, trying to steer away from the intensity in his gaze. “Really. You have saved me, in a way.”
“I have never felt like this before,” he said, ratcheting it up a notch.
The truth was, while she wanted to reciprocate his enthusiasm in that romantic moment, she really couldn’t say the same thing back. But she didn’t want to complicate the situation by thinking about her past or her future, so she simply put her hands on the table and pushed herself up to kiss him over the wine bottle and bread basket, as people looked on, charmed and jealous
.
She remembered Allison’s instructions to her.
Be happy right now.
The glittering duo lived in a glorious ménage à trois with New York City: restaurants, operas, theater, indie film houses, out-of-the-way galleries. Chase showed Eden more of
his
New York, taking her to the Botanical Garden Ball, antiques shows on Park Avenue. And she took Chase to photo exhibits in Brooklyn, hole-i n-the-wall theaters with unknown playwright friends, and dinner parties hosted by downtown actors who had collected Otto’s work and known her for years. Rolodexes shuffled like Vegas cards: Eden met Philippe de Montebello and Lee Radziwill and Chase met Liv Tyler and Sarah Jessica. Eden heard the philharmonic for the first time, and Chase heard the Scissor Sisters. She dined at Le Cirque, he at a dumpy hibachi Japanese restaurant where you sit on the floor next to NYU students doing sake bombs (Brooke would die). It was a thrilling time, for both, with months full of adventure and new discoveries and cinematic film-still moments. But Eden tried not to think of the future; she wanted to just stay in the moment.
One night, the pair stood in the freezing cold after dinner, deciding whether to hail a cab home or go for a drink. The night was so beautiful, it felt a shame to retire so early.
“I have a random idea,” Chase said. “Would you ever want to get some coffee or hot chocolate and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge? I haven’t done that since I was a kid and it looks so cool tonight with the lights and the moon like that.”
“Okay, sure, great idea!” Eden responded, happy he was so spontaneous; she didn’t know he had it in him. “Look at the moon! It looks so orange tonight, it’s almost like Mars.”
“I’ve never seen it like that,” Chase marveled, transfixed. “Though, honestly, nothing shocks me when I’m with you.”
They started walking under the patterned cables and crosshatched steel web that felt grander than any portal she had ever walked through. They clutched coffee cups with their outside hands and held the inside ones, fingers interlaced. But while Eden was fully relishing the moment with Chase, she slowed down, the brakes put on her feet by a sudden flood of crystal clear memories that charged forth like rushing, whitecapped waves washing over her brain. It was déjà vu times ten.
The scenic image she beheld felt so close and recent to her, she could almost see Wes on that very bridge, when she had looked forever in the face and so callously dismissed it. Half a lifetime ago. A chill rushed through her body and Chase held her close, thinking mistakenly that it was the night wind that made her shudder. But in fact it was the sudden and overwhelming recollection that she had walked this bridge before, also in the throes of young love, on the same chilly kind of night, under the same bright stars, on the same exact path, but in an altogether radically different place.
50
Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.
—Susan B. Anthony
A
fter a post-dinner stroll home under the stars and another blissful night of curling up in Eden’s pillow-covered bed, the duo parted ways the next morning. Chase kissed her good-bye and hurried off to work.
“See you tonight.” He waved and she blew him a kiss.
Now that she was out of Otto’s business, she had the burden of having to figure out what to do with herself all day. She still had enough money from Otto, at least for now, and she wasn’t much of a shopper, so she faced the blank road of hours ahead of her like ticking lines on a highway, outstretched, infinite and loaded with exits. What to do? Ah, the problems of a lady of leisure.
Eden decided that she would spend the day at the Metropolitan Museum. To her own shock, she realized she hadn’t once been there since her move uptown, despite her proximity.
She bought herself a coffee at E*A*T and walked up the many steps of the majestic building at 1000 Fifth Avenue. After giving her donation and pinning that day’s bright orange MMA circular metal tag to her lapel, Eden gazed up at the awe-inspiring ceiling, overwhelmed by the scope and choices. There were so many different artistic avenues she could wander—Etruscan vases or French paintings? Dead shark or dead Egyptians? Something about the grandiose, magnificent building gave her chills; it made her feel so small, the scale and scope of the architecture, the history of art before her. In fact while the enormous campuslike museum held sculptural busts and portraits of pharaohs and presidents, it also displayed Eden. Her portrait hung in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, the modern arm of the museum; she had gone several times when the museum first acquired the piece, a grand, ethereal, haunting masterpiece of Otto’s from fifteen years back. She was sealed in, part of the canon. Like Dora Maar. Or Whistler’s mom. Or the dead shark.
Most people in Eden’s position would want to revisit their painting, to experience anew the thrill of being immortalized on such a spectacular skylit wall. But not her. The picture represented a time long ago lost. So she blithely decided to go in the opposite direction: toward the tombs.
She leaned over sarcophagi, looking at the gilded stenciling and imagining the lives of the people who lay beneath. They probably bit it by forty. Or if not, by her age, they’d certainly be the village elders. Ye olde wise one. She meandered on, admiring a lapis pendant, checking out a headless statue with huge boobs (some things never change), and scanning the hieroglyphs. Why were the people always drawn sideways? They could build huge fucking pyramids but couldn’t render humans without profiles?
Eden was happy to let her brain float to outer space as her eyes gazed at the myriad earthly treasures. Even the architecture itself was art. In the vast and serene Temple of Dendur, she walked along the gleaming, windowed wall, the muted light washing the mammoth but quiet room, as she watched kids throw coins in the shallow fountain and make whispered wishes. She smiled to herself watching the sweet-faced teachers hush the giggling kindergarteners on a field trip. As they gleefully tossed their shiny nickels, she felt a pang; she missed small children.
“Eden?!” a voice beside her asked with surprise. “Is that you, my dear?”