After dinner they walked down the street, past the bank and the post office. She held his arm. She’d let him down, she felt; she wanted to do better.
At city hall they turned into the rose garden. In spring it would be full of colorful blooms, floodlit at night and a popular destination for evening strollers; but tonight the bushes were bare, and the paths were empty except for the two of them. They walked the outer lanes, gravel crunching under their shoes.
“Hey, I ran into Tom Shepard the other day,” he said, “at Ace Hardware.”
“You’re kidding.” She hadn’t thought of Tom Shepard in years. Brody had worked with him at Xyno, the company he’d been at before Oiron. Tom had been single; she remembered because she’d tried to fix him up with Sarabeth. “How is he?”
“Great. Married. His wife was with him, she’s from Cleveland.”
“Oh, how funny. We should have them over.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
They had circled the garden, and now they left and headed back, passing the library and the fire station.
“How’s Sarabeth?” Brody said. “You haven’t mentioned her in a while.”
They were in front of the town diner now, and Liz looked through the window: dark, though on weekdays it was full of old-timers, on weekends families with toddlers or hordes of soccer-uniformed kids.
She said, “Were you thinking of that time we did dinner with her and Tom?”
“They didn’t exactly hit it off.”
She let go of his arm and turned up the collar of her coat. “The thing is, I don’t actually know.”
“What?”
“How Sarabeth is.”
He slowed and gave her a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”
“I think we’re finished.”
Now he stopped altogether. “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”
“We aren’t talking.”
“Liz,” he said. “My God, what happened?”
She shrugged.
“I can’t believe this. I knew she hadn’t been around, but—why didn’t you tell me?”
She brought her gloved hands together and listened to the whisper as she rubbed them back and forth. She remembered a mom from the elementary school days, admonishing another woman:
Don’t try to talk to your husband—that’s what your girlfriends are for.
She thought of her parents’ marriage, the absolute division of realms. But look at them now! Playing bridge together, taking each other to the doctor.
Her mother had made it all look so easy.
She looked into Brody’s face, saw he was waiting for her. She said, “I don’t tell you everything.”
He opened his mouth and closed it again, his eyes full of hurt.
“Come on, let’s go home,” she said, and she took his arm and held it with both her hands, leaning into him as they walked. “Don’t worry,” she said softly. “It’s OK.”
He stayed silent until they got to the car. He opened her door. “You can’t be finished with Sarabeth, can you?”
“No,” she said. “Which is why I may have to be.”
“What?”
She got in and adjusted her coat underneath her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I meant by that. But really, don’t worry. It’s OK.”
Kathy had foil-wrapped chocolate hearts on her desk the next day and a sign saying
HELP YOURSELF
. At first she affected an attitude of mystery, making Brody wonder if she had an admirer. Then she confessed she’d stopped at Walgreens on her way to work, for the half-off sale.
“When these are gone I’ve got a package of red and pink M&M’s waiting.”
He said, “You bring out M&M’s, I’ll rewrite your evaluation. I’ve gained enough weight this year already.” He grabbed another chocolate and waved as he headed into his office.
In fact, he was softer at the middle than he’d ever been before; in bed last night Liz had rubbed her hand back and forth across his abdomen, and his belly had moved with it. He thought of that hand, its southward wanderings, its fingertips at his thighs—its perfect squeezing pressure. And then, at just the right moment, her mouth.
His in-box was already jammed, the usual distribution list junk plus at least a dozen messages requiring real attention. And he had to call Boston, to iron out a few last points with the guys there. He imagined flying out again—just for one day, for the advantages of face-to-face contact. But there was no need.
He made the call, wrote six or eight e-mails, went to a meeting with Russ and Dale Quigley, the CFO. Now there was a go-getter: three major promotions in two years.
Brody,
Dale always said when they ran into each other,
good to see you,
and he’d smile and offer Brody his hand even if they’d just seen each other the day before. (
Watch the smilers,
Brody’s dad used to say.
Figure out a guy’s smiles, and you’ve figured out the guy.
)
When the meeting was over, Russ asked Brody to stay. They remained at the conference table, Brody watching Dale as he passed by the interior windows, glanced in at them, walked on.
“He’s going places,” Russ said.
Brody nodded, then said, “Wait,
going
places going places?” Like Dale or not, he was the best CFO the company’d had; Brody didn’t want to see him leave.
“Maybe,” Russ said.
“Really?”
Almost imperceptibly Russ shook his head. “So you talked to Boston? We’re good?”
Brody brought Russ up to speed, explaining what the CEO had told him. Russ asked some questions about another deal, and then they were finished.
“So what about Dale?” Brody said as he pushed back his chair, but Russ just shrugged.
“He’s a striver. He’s the only guy I see here after midnight.”
“Jesus, Russ, what are you doing here after midnight?”
“It’s when I get some of my best work done.”
“You amaze me,” Brody said. Whatever was going on with Dale, Russ wasn’t in a confiding mood. Brody got to his feet and pushed his chair in. “Onward, then.”
“Onward.” Russ stood, too, and his bare scalp caught the light from one of the spots in the ceiling. He looked tired, but down at the bone level; his skin was tanned from skiing, ruddy from the sun and wind. He tightened his fancy tie, clapped Brody on the shoulder.
“I was thinking,” Brody said, but he’d been thinking of the early years, pre-IPO, when he’d worked insane hours himself. He and Russ and a couple other guys had found a Mexican restaurant in Mountain View that would keep its kitchen open late if they had some advance notice, fire up chicken quesadillas at midnight, 1:00 a.m., for the guys at Oiron. It had been fun, crazy, ridiculous. He kind of missed it.
“You were thinking?” Russ said.
“Never mind—better let it percolate a little more.” He saluted Russ and headed back to his office, grabbing a couple more chocolates as he passed Kathy’s desk. He had phone calls to return, but he went to Google instead, typed “Sarabeth Leoffler” and “Berkeley, CA.” Only seven hits, and none with any contact info. He tried People-Finder, but her number was unlisted, as he’d figured it would be.
Not that he would have called.
What’s up with you and Liz?
Not in a million years. She was Liz’s project, in his view. Liz’s
project.
“I have this friend,” Liz had said, early on, “she’s sort of like a sister”—which had failed to convey the first thing about the reality of the matter. Five feet of chaos, that’s what Sarabeth was.
Maybe this was better, actually. A little distance.
But no, he didn’t really think that. He’d made his peace with Sarabeth long ago.
At six he wrapped things up and headed to his car. Six o’clock, and the sun wasn’t all the way down yet. He liked the California dusk in late winter: pale sky reflected in the pale bay; hills green for the brief spring, little yellow and white flowers sprouting everywhere. And evenings like this: calm, cool, clear.
He wanted last night back again. He wanted all of it: the sex, the rose garden walk, the dinner. He wished he’d made a better toast.
To my beautiful wife
or something. She was, in fact. Beautiful. They hadn’t had a weekend away in a long time. Why’d he punted his career, or at the very least plateaued, if he wasn’t going to take his wife away for the weekend? He was. Soon.
36
S
arabeth was perplexed by a great many things, but mostly by herself, by the weird tranquillity she was beginning to feel—about Liz, about everything. Maybe it was just the way things were when you got older. You let go more easily.
She had with her house. Nothing bothered her anymore—not the falling-apart bathroom, not the makeshift curtain blocking her view of the Heidts’, not the splintery porch nor the dusty pile of objects on the living room floor. The stuff on the floor had even taken on a feeling of permanence. Why not keep it there? It was as good as anywhere else.
In this mood she dug out a box of college papers and found one of her old journals, a blank book with a blue cloth cover. It was full of writing, page after page—not just accounts of her life, but all kinds of other stuff, too: lists of things she’d liked, juxtaposing the exalted (“Chopin’s études”) with the mundane (“Reese’s peanut butter cups”). She’d written about her relationships: “Last night, Jerome said he thought he loved me but that it wouldn’t be fair to either of us for him to say so until he was sure. I really respect him for that.” Then she’d gone back afterward and annotated: “Hello, Sarabeth? He was an asshole!” She’d experimented with alternate handwritings—all caps, like her architecture-major roommate; the tiniest scrawl possible, to show how tortured she was. She’d even played with her name: Sara, Sara B, Sarabande, Sarabé.
And then there was this:
“Lorelei Leoffler is survived by her daughter, Sarabeth.” Think about this. There’s “survived by” and “survived by”: “outlived by” and “tolerated by.” “Lorelei Leoffler was tolerated by her daughter, Sarabeth.”
How true.
She’d been twenty-one when she’d written that—an adult. She couldn’t believe the melodrama, the self-pity. Yet she felt in an odd way protective of that former self; when she packed the journal away again, she rubberbanded onto it a note that said “Fragile.”
She was less so. One bright Friday afternoon she went window-shopping: peered into an exotic bird store, paused outside a boutique where she’d once bought a clingy red dress she’d never worn. She stopped in front of a brand-new spice shop and on a whim went inside and wandered around, looking into open bowls, leaning down for a smell of clove, of nutmeg and cinnamon. She found a tin labeled
STAR ANISE
and opened it to a collection of odd, woody flowers, not at all what she’d expected. Star anise—what
had
she expected? The smell was like licorice, and the flowers were exquisite, circles of perfect hard petals that dug into the pads of her fingertips when she squeezed one.
She was finally getting her act together lampshadewise, and she let herself buy the tin, all $5.95 of it, as a souvenir of she didn’t know what. She lingered in the shop for an extra moment, reluctant to leave the rows of glass jars, the sound of the grinder as it pulverized hard pods into powder.
Outside, she hesitated; what now? Coldwell Banker had an office nearby, and she wondered if it was the one where Peter Something—Peter Watkins—worked. On tour with Jim last week, she’d seen him for the first time since the day he helped her, and she’d been mildly disappointed when he only smiled and nodded.
“He doesn’t remember,” she said to Jim.
“Of course he does.”
It was the Rockridge Coldwell Banker where he worked, she remembered now. She went and stood in front of this one anyway, looked at the listings and recognized a house she’d staged for Jim a few years back. She cupped her hands at her eyes and peered inside. There were five or six people at desks, talking on phones or tapping at keyboards. As she looked, a woman at the back saw her and waved, then held up her forefinger as if to say
Wait.
Did she mean Sarabeth?
The woman smiled and nodded, finger still aloft, and Sarabeth turned around, looking to both sides to make sure there wasn’t someone else right there. The sidewalk was empty, and she hesitated and then stepped to the door. She actually recognized the woman, from touring with Jim; she thought Jim had even worked with her once or twice. She was somewhere in that netherworld of fifty to sixty-five, with chin-length gray-blond hair and an Eileen Fisher outfit.
Once inside, Sarabeth took a few steps forward and then stopped. The place was dim, and though the woman smiled as she approached she looked almost surprised. What did she want with Sarabeth? Something about staging?
“Hi, there,” she said. “Can I help you?”
Confused, Sarabeth looked around again, and now she saw that in fact a car had pulled to the curb right in front of the office, and the driver had lowered the passenger-side window and was leaning forward, waiting.
A young guy at a nearby desk hung up his phone and looked from Sarabeth to his colleague and back again.
“Do you have a minute?” the woman asked him. “Can you help this lady while I step outside?”
When she was gone, he cracked a wide smile. “Sorry, that was just so classic.”
“You saw the whole thing?”
“Start to finish. But I was on the phone, and anyway, some things have to play out in real time.”
He was in his early thirties, surprisingly young for a guy in real estate. Men usually came to it later in life; Jim had had a whole career as a high school English teacher before he made the switch. This guy had a pristine look: close shave, expensive polo shirt, immaculate fingernails. He could have been a pilot on his day off, even a male model, though he wasn’t particularly handsome; just perfect.
“
Can
we help you?” he said. “Are you house hunting?”
“I was honestly just looking in the window.”
“So what
are
you hunting for?”
She hesitated for a moment. “Peace and love, same as everyone else.”
His smile was slow at first, and then his lips parted and he was grinning. He said, “Would you settle for coffee?”
“You’re asking me to have coffee?”
“Technically, I was asking if you were
hunting
for coffee. But that might be splitting hairs.”
“I’m way older than you.”
“What does that mean—you have insomnia? A weak bladder? Your days of drinking coffee are over?”
Sarabeth shook her head, but she couldn’t stop smiling. “Who
are
you?”
“Who are you?”
“Just a passerby.”
“Oh, I doubt that.”
The door opened, and the blond woman came back in. “Are we taking care of you?” she asked as she headed back to her desk, but she didn’t slow for an answer.
“The royal ‘we,’” the guy said under his breath. “What a gal.” He lowered his voice even further. “My mother,” he added.
Sarabeth looked at the woman, then back at him; she’d have sooner believed they were lovers.
“How old are you?” she said.
“Twenty-eight.”
“I was in
college
when you were born.”
He shrugged, and she stood there for another moment and then gave him a little wave and headed off, pushing through the door into the sunlight.