The Good Life (2 page)

“Tell me. You never talk to me about him.”

His voice sounded nonchalant, but he was never nonchalant. I took care with my response. “We eat take-out and watch TV. We have extended conversations with Toulouse. Jeff does a terrific imitation of Cary Grant. It's a good life.”

He let that comment hang for a moment before telling me, “You were born to be married.”

“Here's a news flash: so were you.”

“And that's just my bad luck.” He gestured at my half-finished omelet and cold toast. “Are we finished here?”

“Nearly. But you should know that I'm not letting you into the party if you don't come with a date. And this is not a party you're going to want to miss.”

“You'll let me in, all right. Otherwise I'll howl outside and embarrass Jeff.”

“You sulk. You don't howl.”

“You think you know so much.” Tilting his head back, he opened his mouth and let out a yodel that was long, intricate, and chilling. He rode the notes until they quivered, then shattered, and then he started again. Every conversation in the restaurant stopped, and waitresses started toward us from three different directions. He grinned at me, and I grinned shakily back.

“You know what you are?” I said.

“The man of your dreams,” he said.

“Bad dreams,” I said. We said it all the time.

 

To my surprise, Alice agreed to go shopping for a party dress. We spent two hours before she found what she was looking for, a pink confection of a frock with a skirt that would twirl. To celebrate, she suggested a mineral water at High Five, a sports bar across from the mall. I looked at her clear glass with its bobbing lime slice, called back the waitress, and ordered a Singapore sling.

“When I told Dik we were going shopping, he told me to get something pretty,” Alice said. “He told me that celebrations are external as well as internal. He thinks it will open the door to new energies. That's as good a way as any to get him to a party.”

“I was trying to decide on music,” I said. “Do you still have your square-dancing tapes? The only country music I have is Patsy Cline.”

“I learned the two-step to Patsy Cline. I never hear her without wanting to tap my feet.”

“You hear ‘I Fall to Pieces' and want to dance?”

Alice ate her lime rind. Back when she was a secretary for a temp agency, she was plumply pretty, her dimpled face set in a corona of springy yellow curls. She went to singles bars and never left alone. Now her face was thin and brown as bark from the hours she and Dik spent in their immense garden. Her hair looked like straw, but her smile could still make heads swivel. “I haven't turned into a total flake, you know,” she said.

“I wouldn't have a party for a flake.”

“I'm trying out some new ways of living, and Dik helps me with that.”

“I've got eyes, Alice.”

“Well, some eyes need glasses. He isn't—the easiest person to live with.” She swirled her water, and I counted to five to keep from saying anything stupid.

“Who is?” I said. “Apart from us.”

“He's this terrific optimist. The universe makes him an optimist. If he wants rain, we get rain. If he wants asparagus tips, they're pointing through the dirt the next day.”

“Does he want Alice to get what she wants?” I murmured.

“Shoot. I want Dik, and there he is, every morning, out on the deck.” She gave her water glass another swirl. “Don't leave me out here all alone. What do you want, you and Martin?”

I clutched my throat. “
Jeff
. You're supposed to be my friend. Don't marry me off to Martin.”

“Freudian slip. You and Jeff,” she said. I didn't know another soul who blushed.

I said, “Can you even imagine living with Martin? One minute everything's fine, the next minute you're in the volcano. I love the guy like I love my right arm, but I wouldn't want to live with him.”

“I meant to say Jeff.”

“You want to know a secret? I sided with Martin's wife in the divorce. Who couldn't look at Martin and tell he'd be hell to live with?”

“You don't want to talk about Jeff, do you?”

Plucking the thin red straw from my cloying drink, I flattened the plastic into a stick. “The only problem with Jeff and me is that we don't have any problems.” I looked up in time to catch Alice's extremely expressionless face. “If this is denial, tell me what I'm denying. Jeff and I tell each other jokes. We divide up the chores. We see the same world.”

“I'll bet this party wasn't his idea,” Alice said.

“It wasn't. But he can't wait to see you.”

“Tell him I can't wait to see him, either.” She nibbled at her fingertip and glanced up at me through demure eyelashes.

“Why, Alice. I didn't think you remembered how to flirt.”

“I'm married, not dead. You told me at my wedding shower not to forget the difference.”

“Tell Martin,” I said.

“You first,” she said.

 

I drove home feeling a little sick from the liquor pooled balefully in my stomach. Jeff was stretched across the couch, watching
All About Eve
, Toulouse slung over his shoulder like a stole. “Your night to cook,” Jeff said.

“Yeesh. Forgot. I've been off getting half plotzed with Alice. You should see the dress she got. It'll send the whole party into insulin shock.” I watched him watch the TV, Toulouse snoring beside his ear. “How long have you been zoned here?”

“Since the last half-hour of
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
It's a Bette Davis festival. That was one terrible movie.”

“You want me to call for a pizza? You don't have to get up—I'll feed it to you a bite at a time.” Even I couldn't decipher my tone.

“Up to you.
The Little Foxes
is on next.” He waited until I was settled on the couch next to him before asking, eyes still on Bette Davis's bow-tie mouth, how Alice was.

“You'll like this. She thinks that you and I are secretly miserable.”

“There's a lot of that going around.”

His eyes didn't waver from the TV screen, and I reached over to scratch Toulouse under the chin, a caress that always made him extend his claws. “Martin would say we need misery. He'd say it's how we know we're alive.”

Jeff extracted the cat's claws from his neck and sat up. “I wonder what it would be like to go through a day without hearing Martin's name.”

“He thinks you're a lucky man. He says I should tell you so. If I don't, he says, he will.” I meant to sound saucy, but I could feel the words slipping as they left my mouth. Jeff's face was stiff and peculiar, and my stomach felt as if cold air were pouring into it.

“Lucky. What a word.” His voice clotted, and the cold feeling spread across my lungs. “Here's a Martin story for you. Back when things were getting so rocky between him and Charlotte, she called me about getting a personal loan. Her name only. Martin had broken all of her antique serving dishes—not in one big rage, but across months. She would come home and find another tureen in pieces. He used to scream at her until he wasn't even saying words anymore, just howling. She was terrified. Your friend Martin.” He blinked at me, then looked away. “You and I had been married two years. Charlotte and I didn't last long. Six months.”

“What.” My voice was dry as wind. “What are you doing?”

“I'm telling you my secret despair. An homage to Martin.”

“Stop talking about Martin.”

“I can't stop talking about Martin. He's over every inch of our life.”

The image of a slow, creeping stain in the air between us came immediately, as if I'd been holding it ready. “Does he know?” I said.

“Why else would I tell you?”

“So you're acting out of kindness.”

Jeff closed his eyes. “I haven't seen her since then. Not a phone call or an email. Zip.”

“Congratulations.”

“Aren't you itching to get on the horn and tell Martin, ‘Guess what I just found out?'”

Jeff's face, even his eyes, were pale as dust. He might blow away any second. I said, “What do you think I am? I don't want him to know this. I don't want to know this.”

“But now you do. You know everything Martin knows. And I think it will be very hard for you not to tell him that.” He sat Toulouse up on his lap and addressed him as if he were conducting an interview. “Felicia has a secret. What do you think Felicia will do?”

“I didn't ask for this,” I said.

“Think of it as a gift,” he said.

 

Dik had given mulch to a pine tree. I had given Alice brandy. Jeff had given me wretchedness, mortification, five straight nights without sleep.

I pondered his gift instead of thinking about divorce lawyers or separation, ideas that I could not give weight, though I tried. Perhaps if I had caught Jeff and Charlotte together, lunching in Sausalito with their ankles entwined, I might have stormed to an attorney's office and dictated page after legal page of demands. But Charlotte had galloped away, leaving only memory, which had no smell or substance. Memory was nothing at all.

In the thin dark of the study where I lay on the fold-out bed, I stared toward the nubbled ceiling and remembered, of all things, phrases of Dik's. “Every moment is movement toward wholeness.” “Rejoice in discord, for it leads to harmony.” What kind of person could look at his wife's friends' marriages—one already vanished, the other blistering—and rejoice?

If I could become that kind of person, I might stop imagining how Jeff must have kissed Charlotte, his fingers caught in her long black curls. I might stop replaying the hundred conversations that he had strewn with plump hints. Already I was taking the outrage and turning it into something else—wisdom or defeat, if there was a difference. The emotion that wedged unabsorbably, like a muscle in my chest, was embarrassment. Once I had bragged to Martin about how Jeff came home from work smelling like strange spices. “Those downtown restaurants!” Now, in the dark, I felt my face turn the pillow hot.

I didn't tell Martin what I knew. Even in simple times, letting on that Jeff and I had been fighting, or had come close to fighting, or might soon be fighting, would be like giving him a gift-wrapped hand grenade. But at the restaurant where we met for breakfast, Martin caught my wavery gaze and nervous fingers.

“Come on. You can tell Uncle Mart. Jeff lost his job? Toulouse got beriberi? You're pregnant?”

“Interesting parallels.” I stared unhappily at my syrup-bloated waffle. As the party grew nearer, Martin and I were meeting daily.

“Well, I hope you'll name the baby after me.”

“Are you kidding? My child will be named after someone with a pleasant nature and a helpful manner.” I couldn't banish all of the quiver from my voice. “Now tell me that you've found a date for the party.”

“I told you, the only date I want is already taken. Have you and Jeff been brushing up that waltz?”

“Not exactly. Look, Martin, this is an anniversary party. It's all about couples. You can't just moon around the punch bowl.”

“It beats dragging some poor gal to a wingding where she doesn't know anybody and gets to watch me drink myself cross-eyed.”

“The whole
point—
” I took a breath and started again, more softly. “The whole point of having a date is to have fun with her. So you don't need to get cross-eyed.”

“You really don't know,” he said, shaking his head. “You really don't know what you're asking me to do.”

Too easily I imagined Jeff mimicking Martin's words, his slump, his voice creamy with self-importance. I'd been hearing that imitation a lot in the past few days, as every object of Jeff's anger tumbled loose like items from an overstuffed closet. Eventually, I assumed, anger of my own would tumble out. I said to Martin, “I'm asking you to try to be happy, all right? I'm asking you to reach out your little hand in the direction of pleasure. Just this once.”

“What do you think I'm doing here? This morning? With you? Do you think it's normal for a man and a woman to meet every single day and just
talk?
” His chin was thrust out, his lips curled back from his teeth. I looked away first.

“Martin, you know I love you.”

“Stop right there,” he said.

“You are my best friend.”

“So, Best Friend, you've been helping poor Martin through a rough patch? Been kind of a long patch, wouldn't you say?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“Maybe that should have told you something. Jesus.” He shook his head. “You don't pay attention.”

“You're not the first one to tell me that.”

“But you keep drifting along, expecting all of us to look out for you. Why are you crying?”

“Headache,” I said.

“I'm only telling you the truth.”

“Thank you.”

“I pay attention to the world that's in front of me, not the one I want to see.” He waited for me to respond, then said, “Give it a try sometime. No telling what you'll find out.” He left the diner without yelling. Even so, a waitress came over and rested her hand on my shoulder.

“You need me to call anybody?”

I wiped my eyes. “We're friends,” I said. “We do this all the time.”

 

Once the party got started, the guests laughing and the music not yet too loud, my spirits surprised me by lifting. Dik and Alice danced like gangly angels, and I was glad I'd resisted the frightened, last-minute impulse to call things off.

Across the room, beside the drinks table, Martin banged his hands together to laud the happy couple. At his side, peering at the crowd with interest, stood Lora, his date.

“How nice that you're here,” I'd said at the door. “Where did you and Martin meet?”