Once Upon a Time, There Was You

“Do you?” Sadie said. “Is that why you asked me?”

  Irene said nothing.

  “Mom? Do you miss Minnesota?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  By the time Irene parks the car, she has twenty minutes to kill before she meets Valerie. She sits in the park across from the hotel watching a small group of older Japanese women practicing qigong. It’s lovely, a slow-motion kind of ballet, and the faces of the participants are both focused and peaceful. She wonders if she should start classes. Valerie and Ben go, and they keep telling her she should come with them. But Irene is not a joiner. Never has been. Her favorite teacher in elementary school was the one who said Irene could stay in at recess because she didn’t like group sports.

  Irene closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sun. She tries to imagine herself alongside Valerie and Ben, doing qigong. She thinks it’s wonderful that they do the classes together. She envies Valerie everything about her relationship with her husband. They are the model for what she wishes she could have. Valerie and Ben have never stopped having fun, have never lost interest in one another. But their loyalty to each other builds a wall around them. If Irene and Valerie are on the phone when Ben comes home, Valerie gets off. “My man is home; I’ve got to go,” she always says, and there’s not nearly enough irony in it to suit Irene. “You don’t have to get off the phone just because he comes home!” she said, once. “This isn’t 1950!” And Valerie said, “I know I don’t have to. I want to.”

  A shadow blocks the sun, and Irene opens her eyes to see if clouds are rolling in; rain was forecast. But it’s not a cloud, it’s Jeffrey Stanton, the man she met on the day she quit work.

  “Jeffrey!”

  “Irene Marsh! What are you doing here?”

  “Meeting a friend for lunch. At the Huntington.” She looks at her watch. “In about ten minutes.”

  He sits on the bench beside her. “Well, we’ve got a little time. What’s new?”

  “I’ll give you the Cliffs Notes,” she says, and fills him in on Sadie’s marriage. She has no idea why she’s told a man who is little more than a stranger such an intimate thing. It just burst out of her.

  He’s perfectly calm about it, though. “I guess your work’s cut out for you,” he says, smiling. And then, “Would you like my opinion?”

  “Why not?”

  “I think you should have the boy and his parents over. Invite them for dinner or something.”

  Irene nods. Fat chance. “Ron’s father died. He only has a mother.”

  “Well, invite her,” Jeffrey says. “You may not want to, but you know how it goes; if a parent denies something, a kid only wants it more. In the end, maybe you’ll just have to accept this.”

  “I don’t want to accept this.”

  Jeffrey says nothing, and, after a moment, she shakes her head and sighs. “I know.”

  “It’s not the worst of all possible things,” he says.

  “I suppose not.”

  “Hey, you know what? I was going to call you tonight.”

  She looks at him, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Were you?”

  “Yup. I’ve got tickets to a Giants game next week, right behind home plate. Would you like to go? Dinner will be provided either at the game or afterward, your choice.”

  “Oh, Jeffrey, I don’t know.”

  “No big deal. I just thought you’d like it.”

  “I haven’t been to a ball game since I was a little girl and I went with my grandpa. I asked him what the priests were doing on the field.”

  “The priests? … Oh! The umpires! Well, they do forgive sins.”

  Next week, Sadie will be gone. John will be gone. It might be fun to go to a ball game.

  Jeffrey leans forward. “Throw this into the mix: If we don’t eat at the game, I was going to take you to a joint with the best meat loaf. You’re a retro kind of girl, right? They put relish trays on the table. Celery sticks with cream cheese.”

  “Sounds great.” She imagines sitting there with him, enduring again the stares of younger women wondering why he’s with her.

  He looks at his watch and grimaces. “Uh-oh, gotta go. I’ll call you.” He kisses her cheek and starts walking away.

  “Jeffrey? How about if I call you?”

  He turns around. “Aw, Irene. You’re not going to go with me, are you?”

  She doesn’t know what to say.

  “I get it,” he says. “No worries.”

  She watches him walk away.

  When Irene goes into the restaurant, Valerie is already seated. Irene sits across from her.

  “Guess who I just ran into in the park.”

  “That younger guy who took you out to lunch?”

  “How do you know?”

  Valerie points to the window they’re seated next to.

  “Oh.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He kind of asked me out again.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s in his early forties!”

  “So?”

  “So to him, I’m … you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. What are you to him?”

  “Just … I’m not going, okay?” It comes out louder than she meant; the men at the table next to them all turn toward her, then resume eating.

  Valerie speaks quietly. “Some men like older women.”

  “I know. He was married to a much older woman. But …”

  “But what?”

  “It’s just not comfortable for me. That’s all. I’m not going.”

  Valerie sighs. “You know I love you, right?”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Just listen.”

  Irene folds her hands in her lap.

  “You know I love you, but you are one of the most exasperating people I have ever met.

  “Honestly. When are you comfortable, Irene? You know, when we were in college and we’d get together with a bunch of people, you were always the first one to leave. And you did it so unceremoniously! You’d just all of a sudden leap up and say, ‘Well, I have to go,’ and poof! You’d be gone. We used to talk about that, how you could never just … stay.”

  “You talked about me after I left?”

  “Yeah. It was weird how you always did that.”

  “Well, I did have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I had stuff to do.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  “I think I know my own answer.”

  Val looks at her, says nothing.

  “I had to leave because I had stuff to do, Val.”

  “Such as …?” Valerie butters a piece of bread, takes a bite. Chews, her eyebrows raised expectantly.

  “How should I know? Stuff! I can’t remember what all I did. But I had things to do!”

  Valerie lays down her bread. “You know what, Irene? I don’t think you had so much to do. I think you left because you just can never stay.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, we’ve been friends for ten thousand years. I’d call that staying, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. That’s a kind of staying. With me, your one really good friend. But do you remember that fight we had when we went to New York together when we were in our thirties? I don’t even know what it was about. But we had a fight and then you told me we were done, our friendship was over. I was sitting on the bed in the hotel room crying and you were totally unmoved, you just walked right out the door.”

  “I came back,” Irene says.

  “Yes. Because I came out in the hall and literally dragged you back and made you stay.”

  For a long time, Irene says nothing. The women sit there, looking anywhere but at each other.

  And then Irene says, “I don’t stay because … because I don’t want to screw things up. I feel if I stay too long, I’ll screw things up. Okay?”

  “But Irene, don’t you know this? When you leave, that screws things up. I wish you would … I don
’t know, I wish you would put down your armor and let things in. Let things happen!

  “I just got a letter from a man I knew a long time ago, asking me to do a favor for him, to put him in touch with a mutual friend. I first met this guy when he was fifty. Now he’s almost eighty. When I saw his name on the return address I thought, Wow, it’s Ellis Coates, I haven’t heard from him for years, for over twenty years! I opened the letter thinking about how I always kind of liked him, he was handsome in that rugged sort of way, and he could be really funny, too. But he was always wrecking his relationships, one after the other, and he was overly intellectual. Depressed a lot, too. I read his letter with real interest, wondering what all happened to old Ellis, how he might have changed over the years. And he … Well, I have it. Listen to this.”

  Val pulls the letter from her purse and reads aloud: “I am sitting here in abject misery, wondering whether I should stick my head in the oven or, given my preference for Woolf over Plath, go rock shopping instead. And then who pops into my head but you, someone ever able to lend a sympathetic ear. I have just ended a yearlong relationship with a woman whose neediness finally … Well, there’s a bunch of stuff about how this woman just didn’t measure up, a bunch of stuff. And here’s what he says at the end: I wish I had better news to share, but you may recall that I have always found it tedious to pretend. I do dare to eat the peach.”

  Val puts the letter back in her purse and sighs. “So. What has changed for Ellis Coates? Nothing. And it was just stunning to me, how he has not changed one bit and I guess he won’t, he’s eighty now. I mean … We do get old, Irene. Time passes. And then we’re done.

  “You know, I used to have this Little Match Girl fantasy that, at the time of our death, we would be carried out of here in the arms of an angel. This really buff angel. And we would be looking back over his shoulder and seeing our whole lives. And I so wanted to be able to say, What a great ride that was! And if we do get carried out in the arms of an angel, I will be able to say that; I feel that. But you …”

  Valerie reaches up to press her fingers into the corners of her eyes. “Damn it. I don’t want to cry. I just want to tell you that I want you to feel that way, too, because you’re my best friend, you neurotic old crank, and I love you and I can’t yank you back into the room all the time, you have to yank yourself before it’s too late!”

  A waiter glides to their table and refills their water glasses, then glides away.

  Irene blinks back her own tears. “Can we not talk about this now? I want to talk about it. Just not now. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Okay. Okay. Things are better with Sadie, huh?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because the first thing you said was not about her.”

  Irene opens the menu.

  “It was about that man,” Valerie says. “That quite handsome man.”

  “Yeah, let me just decide what I want, here.”

  “Oh, I already ordered for you.”

  “How do you know what I want?” She studies the entrées. “I want the pear and blue cheese salad.”

  “Done,” Valerie says.

  “Am I that predictable?”

  “Sorry.” Valerie takes a drink from her frosted glass.

  “I do not want Diet Coke, however,” Irene says, picking up her glass and looking into it.

  “What do you want?”

  “Raspberry iced tea.”

  “Taste it,” Valerie says.

  Irene takes a drink; it’s raspberry iced tea. “You know what my mother used to tell me all the time?”

  “What?”

  “You think you’re so smart!”

  “So how are things?” Valerie asks. “What’s it like living with John again?”

  “It’s … I don’t know. I don’t know how it is.” She looks at Valerie, shrugs.

  “Oh, hon,” Valerie says.

  “What?”

  “It’s hard, huh?”

  “Sometimes it is. But then, at other times, it’s kind of wonderful. It was always that way between us, so … complicated. So much withheld. It must be nice having a marriage like yours. Open. Even. Safe. You have a perfect marriage.”

  “Nobody has a perfect marriage.”

  “You do,” Irene says, and leans back in the chair as her and Valerie’s salads are set before them.

  “Anything else?” the waiter asks.

  “Dessert, after,” Irene says. “As long as she’s paying. Your most expensive chocolate dessert.”

  They are quiet for a while, eating, each of them lost in thought, and then Valerie says, “I’m going to tell you something, but you must promise me never to tell anyone else.”

  “What is it?”

  Valerie looks around the restaurant, then leans in closer to Irene. “I fell in love with my qigong instructor.”

  Irene waves her fork. “Everybody does that.”

  “Everybody does what?”

  “Everybody falls in love with their spiritual adviser. Or therapist, or whatever. As a child, I myself fell in love with St. Francis of Assisi. It was the animal attraction. So to speak.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t sleep with him.”

  “Well, setting aside the fact that he was dead, what are you saying, Val?”

  “I think you know what I’m saying.”

  “You slept with your qigong teacher?”

  “Shhhhh!” She looks around again. “Keep it down; someone I know could be here!”

  “You slept with your qigong teacher?” Irene whispers.

  “Yes!” Valerie whispers back.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No. I fell in love with him. And I told Ben that. That I’d fallen in love with him, I mean.”

  “But not that you slept with him?”

  She pokes around in her salad. “No. Not yet.”

  “But you’re going to?”

  “Well, that’s what I have to decide.”

  “When?”

  “When do I have to decide, or when did this happen?”

  “When did this happen?”

  “It started a couple of months ago. I went without Ben to a class, and the instructor, his name is YeeYee, and I—”

  “His name is what?”

  “It’s YeeYee, and don’t make fun of it! It’s just a name, no different than your name, really.”

  “Oh yes it is, uh-huh.”

  “Do you want to know what happened or not?”

  “Yes. Tell me every single detail.”

  “I’m not going to tell you all the details.”

  “What are you going to tell me?”

  “The skeletal outline, I would say.”

  “Why not the details?”

  “Because they’re not any of your business.”

  “I am your best friend, Val.”

  “Still not any of your business.”

  Valerie’s phone rings. She pulls it from her purse and holds a finger up, answers it. “Hi, Benny. What’s up?”

  She listens, then says, “Great. I’ve always wanted to go there. But listen, Irene and I are just finishing lunch. Can I call you back?”

  She hangs up. “Ben and I are going to the new fusion place on Green Street tonight.”

  Irene says nothing.

  “Irene?”

  Still, she keeps silent.

  “What, you’re mad at me because I had an affair?”

  “I’m mad that you didn’t tell me,” Irene says. “How come you get to ravage all the clothes in my emotional closet and I don’t even get to open your door?”

  “That,” Valerie says, “is the weirdest and worst metaphor I have ever heard in my entire life, and that includes Fred Peterson’s dumb poems about his grandmother’s pies that he used to make us listen to.”

  “Yeah, well, if you’d gotten up and left like me, you wouldn’t have had to hear so many of them. Remember this? Cinnamon me. Sugar me. Make me bake into myself.”

  “Oh, God, I’d f
orgotten that. Oh, poor Fred.”

  There is a protracted silence between the two women, and finally Valerie says, “Oh, all right! Here’s what happened. I stayed after class to ask a question about a pose. He showed me something which involved his putting his hand near my crotch. And I just … I just spun around and kissed him. And he kissed me back. And we … Right on the floor.”

  “On the floor of the studio?”

  Valerie nods.

  “Wow. The floor. Didn’t it hurt?”

  “Yes, it did. In lots of ways. I went home afterward and cried so hard I was howling. But I went to his apartment the next day and we did it again. It was … Well, don’t get mad, but it was the same day you called me over because Don had dumped you. When we drank those martinis. When I left, I took a cab to his place. And that time it was in his bed. He undressed me, and when he saw the lace on my cami, he said, ‘Is this lace from Belgium? Are your earrings Tahitian pearls? Because that’s what you deserve.’ And he touched me with such … reverence. And he looked so deeply into my eyes and he … just … saw me.”

  “Oh, please. You don’t think Ben sees you?”

  “Ben and I were having trouble at the time. We were in this thing where we were just really having trouble. He was basically ignoring me. And I him. And so the prospect of having such a gentle and romantic and attentive lover was something that was so appealing. Maybe it was a little midlife crisis. I thought, I just want to try this. I’ll probably never have the opportunity to try this again. And it won’t hurt anyone.”

  Irene says nothing.

  “I know,” Valerie says. “I know it hurts everyone. Especially when YeeYee started telling me to leave my marriage.”

  “That’s when you broke it off, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re still seeing him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then …”

  “He broke it off,” Valerie says, the color rising in her cheeks.

  “Wow. You got dumped by your qigong instructor?” Irene can’t help it; she starts to laugh. “Did you say, Oh, YeeYee, please don’t leave leave me?”

  “Yeah, it’s not really so funny, Irene.”

  “I know it’s not. I’m sorry.”

  The waiter comes over to their table. “Everything delicious here?”

  “I’d say so,” Irene says.

  “Anyway,” Valerie says. “This was just to clue you in on the idea of ‘perfect marriages.’ The truth is, if he hadn’t called it off, I would have. Honestly. I was coming to my senses.”