Magda raised her glass to take a sip of wine. The cocktail napkin stuck to the bottom. She peeled the napkin off and put it back on the table. Then she reached for the saltshaker and spilled a bit onto the napkin. Jack had taught her that trick.
Ginny looked as though she wanted to ask Magda about the salt on her napkin, but instead marched on. “Yes, I suppose,” she said, lowering her voice, “but do you and Jack still—you know—”
“Why, Ginny Fischer!”
“I’m just asking,” Ginny said. “Friends can ask that sort of thing.”
“They can, but they shouldn’t,” said Magda.
“Well, Frank and I don’t. Haven’t for years.
Years
,” hissed Ginny, shaking her head. She took a long swig of her own zinfandel.
Magda was intrigued. Talking about someone else’s sex life—or even her own—always made her uncomfortable. It just wasn’t right. But this—Ginny’s
situation
—this warranted a little talking about.
“
Years
,” Ginny repeated.
“Ginny, keep your voice down. I heard you the first time,” Magda said. “It’s just hard to know what to say to that.” She took a sip of her wine. Its sugary sweetness coated her insides like liquid velvet. She wondered why she didn’t drink more often, or why she had mostly given it up in the first place. It felt positively wonderful.
“Have you tried—”
“Talking, counseling.
Lingerie
.” Ginny said
lingerie
in a whispered hiss, as if it were a swear said by someone who never swore. “You name it, we’ve tried it. Everything. We’ve tried everything. But
nothing
.”
Magda shook her head slowly, racking her brain for something to tell her oldest friend. Just when she thought she had the answer, Ginny started in again.
“And then I found the Viagra in his drawer.”
“Oh, wonderful!” said Magda. “So he’s taken matters into his own hands. That’s perfect. A man with a little initiative. You sure don’t find those very often.”
“The bottle was half-empty,” said Ginny.
Magda looked at Ginny quizzically, her head tilting to one side. She inhaled sharply. “Oh, my,” she said.
This
was turning into an awkward conversation.
“He denies it, of course,” said Ginny.
“And you believe him?” Magda asked.
“Should I? I don’t know. I want to; I do. But I don’t know if I should.”
“And you haven’t—you know—at all? Since he got the prescription filled?” asked Magda.
“Not once.”
“You’re sure? Positively sure?”
“I’m pretty sure I’d know, Magda.”
“Oh, my,” Magda said again. “My, oh, my. Yes, yes. You likely would then, wouldn’t you?” She inhaled another jagged breath.
“I wish someone would tell me what to do.” Ginny shook her head back and forth and kept her eyes downcast. “Because I don’t know. I really don’t.”
Magda nodded. She remembered back in high school, on career day, when a classmate’s father, a writer for the local newspaper, said that the most important quality in a journalist was an unyielding curiosity about people, and that everyone—
everyone
—had a story to tell; you just had to excavate it. And Magda remembered thinking that maybe she could do that eventually; maybe that curiosity about people was something that grew over time. But she knew now, as a middle-aged woman, that she just didn’t have it in her, and she worried sometimes that it made her a bad person. So, now and then, she’d make stabs at it. She’d try to see whether, just maybe, curiosity had grown in her, secretly, down in her inner reaches, like those beautiful flowers she saw on the Discovery Channel that divers had found hundreds of feet underwater.
But if she were really, truly honest with herself, she’d much rather talk about what was going on with her. She also figured that if anyone else were being really, truly honest, they’d come to the exact same conclusion about themselves.
Tonight felt different, though. Magda actually felt for Ginny. Or maybe she just agreed with her. As a young woman, Magda had had all sorts of ideas about what it meant to be an adult. She had been wildly off the mark as to how fun and fulfilling some of those ideas would turn out to be.
“You need to turn it over,” Magda finally said.
“What do you mean?” asked Ginny.
“Turn it over to your higher power,” Magda stated. “To God. None of this is in your hands anyway.”
The hostess approached them with menus. “We’ll be able to seat you in a few minutes,” she said, “but here are some menus to look over while you wait.”
“I’m not feeling much like dinner anymore,” Ginny whispered to Magda. “What do you think?”
“That’s fine with me. Maybe another drink and then head home?” asked Magda.
Ginny nodded. The hostess sighed loudly. In fact, she did just about everything in her power to signal annoyance short of rolling her eyes: She tapped her foot, put a hand on her hip, and then snatched the menus from their hands before Magda could even get out, “We’re not going to be dining tonight, after all, but thank you.”
The hostess left without so much as a nod in their direction.
“Maybe we should order some appetizers, at least,” Ginny suggested. “This wine has gone right to my head.”
“Good idea,” said Magda, not because she wanted to stay any longer, but more because she felt like she should. That was, after all, what friends did. So she waved down another, friendlier-looking waitress and ordered bruschetta and two more glasses of white zin.
“So, what were you saying?” asked Ginny.
“Sorry?”
“You were talking about turning things over—that I need to turn this over,” said Ginny.
“Oh, right,” Magda said. She was suddenly tired, and couldn’t really remember her previous train of thought.
Ginny waited, looking expectantly at her, but Magda couldn’t bring it back, whatever it was she was going to say.
“I don’t really know, Ginny. You have to believe that things will turn out for the best, whether it’s with Frank or not. Things will be okay.” She felt like a walking, talking greeting card—
Your strength will get you through this difficult time. Thinking of you in your time of need. Thank you for being my friend
. Blah, blah, blah. After all, thought Magda, it wasn’t like the man was dead; he was just having an affair. What did that really matter in the grand scheme of things? Ginny could still talk to him, could still see him. Hell, she was still living with him. And he probably still loved her just the same.
“Plus, that’s the way it is with men, Ginny. Sex isn’t about love and love isn’t about sex with them. It’s that whole mother-whore complex, you know.”
If Frank were dead, or dying even, then none of this would even matter. Ginny would be begging for just one more day with him, one more hour. No matter whom else he had been with the day or week or month before.
She was losing her patience. Not just now, but in general. Magda couldn’t even watch Oprah or Dr. Phil anymore, when she had for years reported to the couch each day from exactly three until five p.m. as if it were her job. All those people who thought their lives were in shambles just because their spouse had an affair or their child lied to them. Big deal. “Wait till one of them dies!” she wanted to yell at them sometimes. Or maybe she actually had. “Wait till that happens and people stop asking how you’re doing, stop being concerned about you, only a matter of months later, when you’re not really doing all that much better than the moment you found out
.
”
“You’re so lucky, Magda,” Ginny said.
Just that morning at the Luna Cafe, Magda had sat next to an older woman with a very active young child. The boy was coloring “pictures,” which were really just scribbled lines on a paper, but he was so proud and kept running from the kids’ play table over to the woman saying, “Look, ’Amma. Look.”
“He’s precious,” Magda had said to her.
The woman beamed. “My very first grandbaby. They’re just so wonderful. Do you have any yet?”
And that was when it hit her like a freight train. Hit her and ran her over and backed up to do it again.
She had been so busy grieving for the son no longer here that she’d clean forgotten about the kids he’d never have. She’d never be able to celebrate Grandparents’ Day, never get one of those cheesy “World’s Greatest Grandma” mugs. And after seeing the woman with her grandbaby in the coffee shop—a woman she’d never be—that had become the only thing she could think about. There had been only one other time in her life when she had felt unluckier than she felt today.
When Ginny added, “To have someone like Jack,” Magda stopped and thought about it a second. Jack. She did still have him. He’d never pull a Frank. He’d always be there for her. Her rock. She was lucky in that, at least—lucky to have him. She really was. And every last part of her missed him just then.
“Magda, are you drunk?”
Jack’s voice floated over the phone lines. Across thousands and thousands of miles of phone lines. To her. Just for her. Her Jack.
“What do you mean?” she asked coyly, and then hiccuped.
“Lit. Blitzed. Bombed. Crocked. Are you, Magda?”
“I’m allowed to have one little glass of wine now and then.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t allowed,” Jack said, laughing. “I just asked if you were drunk.”
“I’m not
drunk
, Jack,” said Magda. “I’m a little tipsy, but I’m not
drunk
.” She hiccuped again and sat down at the kitchen table. She wished she could lie down on the couch at the moment.
Must look into getting one of those cordless phones
, she thought.
“So what’s going on there?” Jack asked.
“What do you mean, ‘What’s going on here’?” Magda shot back at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” She was feeling less lucky to have him by the minute, even though, rationally, Magda knew Jack hadn’t said one thing that should have made her feel that way.
Jack exhaled audibly. “I didn’t
mean
anything by it, Magda. I was just wondering what you’ve been doing. I haven’t talked to you in a while.”
“This phone rings, too, you know. Why didn’t you call this weekend?”
Magda hated herself for the way she was acting, but couldn’t seem to do a thing about it. She felt possessed—of loneliness and heartache and too much white zinfandel.
Jack told her about the horse show—about the trailers and motor homes and the horses, about how well Macy did, and about how well she rode.
“You should see it, Magda. These horses—we could sell everything we own and still not afford one. It’s another world.”
Magda fought the urge to remind Jack that she had seen it. With him. They had flown to Las Vegas years back to watch Macy. She wrapped the phone cord around her hand and then let it unwind. “So, when are you coming home?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said.
“You don’t
know
?”
“No. I don’t know,” Jack said more firmly.
“I want you to come home.”
“I will, Magda.”
“When?”
“I don’t know yet, Magda. Not yet.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. How about now instead? Or tomorrow. I miss you,” she said, and she really did.
“I miss you, too.”
“So why don’t you just come back, then? There’s a scramble we could golf in this coming weekend at the country club. I could call and sign us up. It’s a little last-minute, but I’m sure Jerry could—”
“Magda, I can’t come home this week.”
“—get us in. Yes, you can,” said Magda. “You have an open-ended ticket. It’s not like you’re not going to be able to get a flight back, middle of the week and all.”
“I know I can, Magda,” Jack said. “But I’m not quite ready. Not yet. Being here feels so good for me.”
“And being here with me isn’t good for you?” Magda asked.
“Magda, that’s not fair. You know it’s not. You’re comparing completely different things. Apples and oranges.”
Hot tears smarted at the corners of her eyes. When she was hurt or angry, or in this case both, she cried. “You’d rather be there with
her
than here with me.”
She knew she sounded juvenile and whiny. And yet, she had long ago stopped asking anything extra of Jack. In the early years of their marriage he had been up to his ears in the stress of starting a business. There had been debts to pay and long hours to work without so much as a dime of it going back into their pockets at first. Magda knew how hard he worked, and admired so much his drive and dedication. She had made it her mission to make the rest of his life as seamless as possible: potty training their son, then carting him to a never-ending series of events as he grew, managing the always-there mountain of laundry, making sure groceries were bought and dinner made. She had even dampened the desire to have another baby because of the financial pressure it would have placed on Jack and the need she would have had to involve him in the domestic front of his life.
She hadn’t ever asked a thing of him before. Just this one time.
“Magda, this isn’t about her or you. This is about me. What’s good for me.”
Magda paced around the kitchen table, tethered to a course of half circles by the phone cord. “It’s about us, Jack. And you’re choosing her right now. I need you. I need you, and you’re choosing her over me.”
“You can act like such a toddler sometimes, Magda. I don’t know how else to explain this to you. This is about
me
. Me and Nash. No one else. I’ve taken care of everyone else my whole damn life, and right now I just need a little time to take care of me. That’s all.”
“Whatever,” said Magda.
“Don’t do that, Magda,” said Jack. “Why don’t you give me a call tomorrow and we can talk this over when we’re both a little more rested?”
She sat back down at the table, remembering the image that hadn’t really left her all day. The Luna Cafe grandmother. The way she smiled at her little grandson. The way he went to her, arms open, ready to be scooped up into hers.