Beautiful Day (10 page)

That was how Margot and Edge had ended up together: Ellie and Audrey, both six years
old, had taken ballet class at Mme Willette’s studio on Eighty-second and Riverside.
Mme Willette’s ballet school was expensive, rigorous, and impossible to get into,
but Margot had heard excellent things about it. Mme Willette held her girls to high
standards—perfect posture, perfect French pronunciation, not a strand of hair escaping
the bun. At the open house, Margot had been captivated by Mme Willette and became
determined that Ellie should study with her. She had mastered the admissions game
after getting three kids into Ethical Culture Fieldston, and she pursued the prestigious
ballet class relentlessly.

Ellie had thrived under Mme Willette’s discipline. She quickly bonded with all the
girls in her class, and her favorite ballet friend was a tiny girl with black hair
and Asiatic eyes named Audrey. Margot had glimpsed the mother a few times—an elegant,
lean woman of indeterminate ethnicity. Ellie begged for a playdate with Audrey, and
she claimed that Audrey wanted a playdate with her, but the odd and awkward thing
about socializing children in
Manhattan was that none of the parents knew each other. And quite frankly, Margot
was intimidated by Audrey’s mother. She looked like she lived downtown, although it
just as easily could have been Sutton Place. Margot didn’t know if she was a Little
Red Schoolhouse mom or a Bank Street mom or a Chapin mom. She might have asked, but
she didn’t have the energy, the
output,
required to forge any new alliances.

And then, one week, Margot went to pick up Ellie from Mme Willette’s—and there, in
the foyer, waiting for the class to be let out, was Edge Desvesnes.

“Hi!” Margot had said, her voice containing amazement and confusion. Edge was way
out of context here; it was like seeing her dentist at the Union Square Greenmarket,
or her childhood minister, Reverend Marlowe, at the hardware store.

Edge had turned to look at her, but she could tell he was having a hard time placing
her, as well.

She said, “Margot Carmichael.”

“Oh, my!” he said, and they embraced.

Margot had known Edge Desvesnes since she was a teenager. He and his first wife, Mary
Lee, used to come to barbecues at the Carmichael house in Darien. There had been a
time when Margot was still in braces and glasses and bad-hair-and-worse-skin when
she had a terrible crush on Edge Desvesnes. She remembered once passing hors d’oeuvres
at a party that her parents were throwing. After she had served Edge, he had turned
to Doug and said, “That’s a beautiful girl you’ve got there, partner. Those eyes.”

And Doug had said, “Don’t I know it.”

Margot had blushed hot and retreated to the kitchen. No one had ever called her “beautiful”
before. The boys in Margot’s class were ruthless about her looks. That Mr. Desvesnes,
who was cool and funny and cute, had called her “beautiful” was enough to turn Margot’s
world upside down.

Beautiful. She had looked at herself in the mirror for months after that, wondering:
Am I beautiful?
And what had he meant about her eyes?

Margot had seen Edge Desvesnes periodically in the years that followed. He came to
dinner to celebrate her parents’ twentieth anniversary, he pulled into the driveway
to honk for Doug when they went golfing, he attended Kevin and Beanie’s wedding. Before
she ran into him outside the dance class, the last time Margot had seen Edge Desvesnes
was at her mother’s funeral. Edge had served as a pallbearer. In Margot’s memory,
he had been with a woman, but Margot had been too racked with grief and swarmed by
people to notice which woman. She had heard through her father that Edge had divorced,
then married, then divorced, then married—but amid the drama of her own life, Margot
hadn’t been able to keep up.

Seeing him again so unexpectedly, Margot felt as flushed as she had been at fourteen.
She said, “You’re not here for…”

“Waiting for my daughter,” he said.

“Your daughter?” In Margot’s memory, Edge had sons. Two with the first wife, one with
the second, or the other way around. Did she remember hearing about a daughter?

“My youngest,” he said. “Audrey.”

Margot said, “Audrey is your daughter? Ellie
loves
Audrey.” Margot swallowed. She thought of the Indochine beauty. “So your wife…”

“My ex.”

“Oh,” Margot said. “Well, I’ve been meaning to approach her about getting the girls
together. I had no idea… I mean, I didn’t know she was
your
daughter.”

At that moment, the door to the studio opened, and the girls filed out in graceful
silence. Ellie reached for the cold water
bottle in Margot’s hand. Audrey wrapped her arms around Edge’s waist and squeezed.

“My daughter,” he said.

“Fifty-nine,” Autumn said now. “That’s old. That’s Viagra territory.”

Rhonda laughed at this.

Margot said, “Not quite.”

Things had turned romantic right away. At that very first encounter, they had exchanged
cell phone numbers, and by that evening, Margot had a text from Edge that said,
You are a knockout, Margot Carmichael.

And she had said,
Moi?

Two Saturdays later, when Edge was back to pick up Audrey, they made plans to have
coffee. A few days after the coffee date, they met for drinks, and drinks had turned
into the two of them making out on a dark street corner in Hell’s Kitchen. Edge had
said, “Your father would kill me if he saw us now.”

And Margot said, “My father will never find out.”

Those had been the words that they’d lived by; those had become the chains that strangled
their relationship, made it clunky, and kept it from growing. Doug could never find
out.

“Whatever,” Margot said now. “It’s kind of a mess.”

“Is he coming to the wedding?” Rhonda asked.

“Yes,” Margot said. “Tomorrow.”

“Well, then, we still have tonight,” Autumn said. “Let’s get out of here.”

That’s a beautiful girl you’ve got there, partner. Those eyes.
Margot had asked Edge if he remembered saying that.

He had shaken his head, baffled.
No,
he said.

Margot flagged the bartender for the check. “This is my treat,” she said.

“Oh, Margot, come on,” Autumn said. “It’s too much.”

“I insist,” Margot said, and she could tell Autumn felt relieved.

“Thank you!” Rhonda said. “That’s really generous.”

Margot looked at Rhonda. Rhonda’s face was fresh, smiling, sincere. This
was
the same woman who had once told Margot she bought dresses at Bergdorf’s, wore them
with the tags on, and returned them the next day?

“You’re welcome,” Margot said. She was done trying to predict what would happen next.
This wedding had taken on a life of its own.

H
e drove to Post Road Pizza, which was a place he used to go with Beth. He asked to
sit at the two-person booth in the front window, which was where they always sat.
He ordered a draft beer, a pizza with sausage and mushrooms, and a side order of
onion rings with ranch dressing for dipping, which was what he and Beth always used
to order. Doug took a couple of swills off his beer and walked over to the jukebox.
It still took quarters. He dropped seventy-five cents into the jukebox and played
“Born to Run,” “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys,” and “Layla.” These were all Beth’s
favorite songs; she had been fond of the rock anthem. If Doug asked Pauline to name
one song by Eric Clapton or Bruce Springsteen, she would be stumped.

There had been a time—six, seven years ago, right after Beth died—when Doug had come
into this pizza place and ordered this food and played these songs and occupied this
booth as a way of wallowing in his misery. Now, he felt, he was doing it as a show
of strength. This was who he really was—he
liked
this restaurant, he loved these songs, he preferred a cold draft beer to even the
finest chardonnay. When the waiter brought his food, he thought with enormous satisfaction:
Not a fresh vegetable in sight!
Pauline would look upon the onion rings with disgust. When he dragged the golden
circles through the ranch dressing, she would say, “Fat and more fat.” Secretly, she
would be dying to take one—but she wouldn’t, because she was obsessed with calories.
The only way she felt in control was when she was depriving herself. And that was
the reason, or part of the reason, why she had become so miserable.

Doug lifted a piece of pizza, and the cheese stretched out into strings. He gloried
in the fact that he was not at home eating lamb chops.

In his back pocket, his phone was buzzing away. Pauline, Pauline, Pauline. She didn’t
know how to text, and so she would just call and call, leaving increasingly hysterical
messages until he answered. He imagined her stumbling around the house, bouncing off
the furniture, drinking chardonnay, calling Rhonda—who, by this time, would be on
Nantucket—saying the rosary or
a Hail Mary or whatever Catholic ditty was supposed to fix the things that went wrong.
Sometimes, when things were really bad with Rhonda or her ex-husband, Arthur, Pauline
would tell Doug that she was going upstairs to “take a pill.” Doug didn’t know what
pills those were; he had never asked because he didn’t care, but he hoped now, anyway,
that she would take a pill, just so she would stop calling.

He could practically
see
Beth in the seat across from him—wearing one of her sundresses, her hair long and
loose, with a little hippie braid woven into the side. She had liked to wear the braid
to let the world know that although she was married to a hotshot lawyer and worked
as a hospital administrator and was the mother of four children and lived in a center-entrance
colonial on the Post Road in a wealthy Connecticut suburb, she still identified with
Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks, she was a Democrat, she read Ken Kesey, she had a
social conscience.

Beth,
he asked.
How did I end up here?

Beth had left the Notebook for Jenna, but she hadn’t left any instruction manual for
him. And oh, how he needed one. When Beth died, he had been lost. The older three
kids were all out of the house, and Jenna had stayed with him for a few weeks, but
then she had to go back to college. He only had to take care of himself; however,
even that had proved challenging. He had buried himself in work, he stayed at the
office for ridiculously long hours, sometimes longer than the associates who were
trying to make partner. He ordered food in from Bar Americain or the Indian place
down the street, he kept a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black in his locked drawer, he
didn’t exercise, didn’t see the sun, and he dreaded nothing more than the weekends
when he had no choice but to return to his house in Darien and the bedroom he had
shared with Beth, and the well-meaning neighbors who drove by, wondering when he was
going to call the landscapers.

He had loved her so much. Because of his line of work—day in, day out, divorce, divorce,
divorce—he knew that his union with Beth was a rare and precious thing, and he had
treated it as such. He had revered her; she always knew how much he loved her, at
least he could say that. But that assurance didn’t fill the hole. It couldn’t mend
the ragged edges of his loneliness. Nothing helped but the oblivion that work and
whiskey provided.

To this day, he wasn’t sure how Pauline had gotten through to him. Probably, like
everything else in life, it was a matter of timing. Pauline had come to see him eighteen
months after Beth’s death, when the acute pain was subsiding and his profound loneliness
was deepening. He had gained thirty pounds; he was drinking way too much. When Margot
paid an unannounced visit to Darien and saw the state of his refrigerator (empty),
his recycling bin (filled with empty bottles), and his house (an utter and disgusting
mess), she had a fit. She said, “Jesus, Daddy, you have to
do
something about this!” But Doug didn’t know what that something was. He was proud
that he managed to get his shirts and suits back and forth from the dry cleaners.