The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D (9 page)

Her art teacher recommended her to a gallery that carried the work of new artists, and she wrote giddily of the sale of two pieces for $100 each. She kept her favorite; a sketch of it in her journal showed a Warhol-style canvas of repetitive, overlapping bicycle wheels. Finally a thick envelope arrived from NYU.

She wrote in the journal all spring and summer, pages filled with longing for closer friends, a more conventional mother, a real relationship with Michael. But as the months passed and her hopes were not met, the tenor of her adolescent wishing cooled. She met Michael more often at night, but stopped dreaming he’d ask her to
share a table in the cafeteria, and stopped hinting that her family used to be larger when he expressed no curiosity or concern.

The grandfather clock gonged once from the darkness downstairs, and Kate forced herself to close the book. Don’t, Kate felt herself urging. Don’t trust him. Though of course whatever was done, was done.

A
BREEZE LIFTED THE
edge of the tablecloth as the sommelier opened the wine and poured an inch for Kate. She gave the glass a small swirl, small because she disliked wine showmanship, and nodded at the taste. He poured two glasses, and left quietly.

The outdoor patio was new, an enhancement like the lounge that had been added after positive reviews in national food publications. Around the flagstone deck, conical topiaries corralled the guests so they did not push back chairs into the organic gardens. Kate and Chris had been seated by the maître d’ near the koi pond, too close. If she were to drop her knife it would enter the water like a harpoon.

Last summer, in the area where they now sat, there had been only four outdoor tables on a balcony overlooking raised flower beds and rows of mesclun. The tables had been positioned so privately that during dessert Chris had slid a hand under her dress, fingers cool from his wineglass trailing condensation on her thigh.

Chris leaned back in his chair, one steel leg inches from the pond’s edge, and smiled. He enjoyed it when she ordered the wine, spoke confidently of menu items and pairings. Kate could feel his pleasure in the way he watched her hand on the glass and her lips on the rim, felt his eyes on her throat as she tipped the glass upward.
He pinched his fingernail in the cork and looked at her across the table. “I like that dress. You look nice tonight.”

“So do you.” She meant it. Summer agreed with him. In spite of his coppery coloring, the sun browned his face rather than ruddied it, and brought out the gold in hair threaded with gray. His neck was strong against the collar and his chin hadn’t gone soft. Any weight he’d gained when he gave up smoking had been beaten back with diet and exercise.

She glanced down at his shoes, tan loafers. “Decided to leave the eco-sandals at home tonight?”

“You don’t like them? I thought they’d be your thing.” He flexed a foot alongside the table. “I picked them up on the Seattle trip last month. The hotel was threatening one of those team-building ropes courses.”

“You love those.”

“Right up there with trust falls and meditations around a campfire.” They shared a knowing smile about forced group intimacy.

Noise from the lounge came through the doorway, the sociable sound of a party where everyone knows one another. At the back of the patio it was quieter. Fireflies blinked beyond the topiaries, and a light wind rustled the square of linen in Kate’s lap. Koi rested, darted, and went still.

Chris folded his hands across his stomach and looked at her in a way that she read as expectant. She smiled in the absence of anything to say. She continued to think and smile as the seconds passed, and her mouth felt carved of wood.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Wrong? Nothing. Why?”

“You just seem a little quiet.” He looked off across the patio, and there was another pause. It was her turn. A flush heated the side of her neck, and she rested cool fingertips against it.

“So what’s going on with that Seattle project?” she tried. “Is it going to happen?”

“Probably. It’s a great location. It’s going to take some renovations and a lot of marketing, but it could work.”

Across the patio a tray clattered, a glass broke, and a woman recoiled from the splash. There were exclamations about a dress, apologies given, soda water rushed in. Grumblings continued for several moments. Kate looked back to Chris and worked to recall the topic.

“So are you going to have to go out there much?”

“Probably a few more times. They’ll be quickies.” He smiled, amused; he knew she wasn’t that interested in the Seattle project. “I was thinking we might be able to turn one into a vacation. We could take the kids hiking around Mount Rainier, and get a ferry over to Vancouver Island. Didn’t you know someone from school who opened up a B and B over there?”

The waiter arrived with their appetizers and placed a bowl of steamed mussels in front of Chris, a beet Gorgonzola salad before her. The cubed beets bloodied the white of the blue-veined cheese.

She imagined bringing James and Piper to Seattle, going to the fish market and then to Mount Rainier, marching up mountain trails into the thin cloud cover. They’d ferry across Puget Sound to Canada and stroll past the Parliament building and moored yachts, go for high tea at the hotel that was like a castle. They might love it so much that they would want to stay. When she’d traveled in her twenties, she’d sewn a maple leaf on her backpack like most people she knew, the well-known tactic for avoiding anti-American sentiment abroad. Their children would grow up drinking pure glacial water and speaking in sentences that lifted at the end like constant questions, safe from those waging war against the more controversial neighbor to the south. She took a bite of beet, and licked red from the tines of her fork.

Chris ordered dessert and handed the menu to the waiter. She took the last sip of her wine, her second glass. The effervescence went to
her eyes and scalp, her fingers and lips, all weightless and animated. The morning’s concerns seemed silly. They were doing fine. She was fine. Maybe she just needed to get out of the house more often; it might be as simple as that.

He leaned back in his chair, crossed his hands over his stomach. “You were reading those journals pretty late again last night,” he said.

She picked up the bottle and poured a small amount in her glass, then tipped the last into his. “It’s strange, reading about the way a person thinks her life is going to go and she has no idea what’s coming. When Elizabeth was young she really loved art. She wanted to be a painter in New York.”

He pushed his glass back and forth, watching the wine slide and cling, and looked around the patio. “Do you know yet what she was doing with that Michael guy?”

That’s what it always came down to in the end. The single greatest point of interest about a woman’s thirty-eight years was not what she had done, but what she hadn’t told anyone she’d done.

“No,” she said. “I’m still reading about high school. It’s sad. She was a pretty lonely teenager and didn’t have a great relationship with her parents.”

“That doesn’t sound like Elizabeth.”

“I know. It’s like I’m reading about a stranger.”

The playgroup had formed arbitrarily, eight new mothers grouped together by the town Newcomers’ Club. Kate had found them a bit much in the beginning, too polished too early in the morning, and their conversations had had no edge, no spice. But over the three years she’d been part of the group, they’d settled into a camaraderie: parties for the celebrations, meals cooked for the crises. Kate had felt closest to Elizabeth; with her, she hadn’t worked to fill silences when it felt as if there was nothing in particular to say. In the quiet she’d felt tacit understanding of … she didn’t know what, exactly. The simple things, the important things. But silences, like solitude, could contain any amount of comfort or discomfort, any degree of truth.

“I still can’t believe she never told me about her sister.” As she said “sister,” Kate was thinking
affair
.

“Maybe she just got used to keeping it to herself. Or the time was never right. It was years before our CFO told me he was a recovering alcoholic.” Then Chris thought a moment. “You know Andy, our communications director?”

“Sure. The guy we had dinner with? And his wife, just before we moved.”

“I just found out she’s actually his second wife. His first wife, the mother of their kids, died of cancer a few years ago.”

Kate tried to remember their dinner together, whether there was anything that came up that would have suggested that it was a second marriage. “He just mentioned it now? You guys travel a lot together.”

“A decent amount. Like I said, I guess it just never came up.”

The waiter brought their desserts, a cheesecake with pomegranate sauce for Chris, a fondue for Kate. She speared a chain of berries and swirled it in small chocolate circles. The impression of the fruit stayed for a few seconds, then smoothed itself as if the fruit had never made a mark.

“The fifteenth was Elizabeth’s birthday. She would have been thirty-nine.” Kate stroked at the surface of the chocolate with the long, thin fork. “Last year on her birthday Emily was only a month old. A year ago at this time, they had no idea what was ahead of them.” She wondered what had been on Elizabeth’s mind as she blew out her candles. Each year Kate always thought
happy and healthy family
, but on her own thirty-eighth birthday three months before, her wish had struck her as meaningless. How happy is happy? How healthy is healthy?

“I wonder if she would have done anything differently if she could have known it was her last year.”

Chris studied her, quiet a moment. “You do that a lot these days.”

“Do what?”

“Look back. Analyze in hindsight. ‘A year ago today.’ ‘At this
time two months ago.’ ” He stretched his legs, and his knees gave a small pop, one first and then the other. “I don’t understand why you find that so interesting.”

He said it as though he were merely curious, but something else was there too. Patience. Or impatience. One done carefully enough was sometimes a mask for the other.

“Well, I guess it’s poignant, looking back at the person who doesn’t know what’s about to hit her. To think that someone can be going along, naïve and content, having no idea a major event is about to shake up her world. Sometimes I wonder how we’d live if we could know in advance.”

The levity she’d felt from the wine had dissipated, and now she felt only tired. She did not remember how she’d gotten into this line of conversation, but it was not where she wanted to be. She looked over her shoulder for the waiter. She needed a transition; a cup of coffee, maybe a glass of port.

“Well, whatever’s going to happen is whatever’s going to happen, and the person of a year ago couldn’t know it,” he said. “It doesn’t cast any judgment on the person you were, or make you naïve.”

She’d touched a nerve. “It’s not a judgment.” He minded the notion that a person could be accountable for what he hadn’t known and had not done. “It’s just a point of curiosity. If anything, it’s a reality check for the way you’re living today. Take that bomb scare in the Metro.…”

He shook his head. “You have to let that go, Kate. It was a false alarm.”

So slowly, in the dim tunnel. They’d all moved up and out so slowly. She was sure she’d smelled smoke, had put her hand to her mouth anticipating the choke and burn.

The fondue fork shook in her fingers, and she placed it on the dessert plate. “I know. That’s not the point.”

“The point is that you’re fine, the kids are fine, we’re all fine. You never know what’s going to happen, so just live each day with no regrets, no loose ends. Right?”

That wasn’t her point at all. She frowned at the chocolate.

“I just wish you’d move past that ‘one day left to live’ mind-set, Kate. That flashback thinking, dwelling on the past, trying to figure out how to live differently because of what you didn’t see coming. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t make anything turn out differently.” He flicked a few crumbs from the table into the pool, and the fat koi turned toward them mechanically.

Flashback thinking. That was one way of putting it. He wasn’t wrong; in the past year it had become a reflexive part of her mental toolbox, the way she measured and made sense of time.
On this day last year
. As if it were possible to wrinkle a gap in time and align two moments side by side, to let the knowledge of the later moment rub shoulders with the naïveté of the first, and soften the blow. There was the person she’d been before last autumn, when the world had gone all wrong not once but twice. And there was the person she was after.

“You know,” he said, sticking his fork into the last of the cheesecake, “I read that there’s a baby boom coming, all the people who reacted to the past year by hunkering down, having another kid. Investing in the future, optimism and hope, all that stuff.”

He was using his nonchalant voice, or rather his trying-to-be-nonchalant voice, looking down at his dessert plate. But he glanced up to see how she was reacting to his words, flashing a crooked smile.