All You Could Ask For: A Novel (35 page)

“It’s not as bad,” she said, “but he’s out just the same.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Okay, I’ve got one more great one for you. I was up all night thinking about this one. How about if you’re dating a guy and you’re having a discussion about the parameters of the relationship and he asks if you would consider it cheating if he got jerked off by a male massage therapist.”

I treasured the look of horror on Samantha’s face. “OUT!” she screamed.

“Why is he out?” I asked.

“Because why is he even thinking about that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s just trying to be prepared for any situation that may arise.”

“He’s out,” Samantha said definitively. “That is an Absolute Deal-breaker.”

“I figured you’d say that,” I told her, “because you’re a pretty tough judge.”

I looked at my watch. One hour remaining. The hours pass awfully slowly in this room. The days can sometimes fly by, and every now and again the minutes move quickly, but the hours are eternal. I was trying to think of another deal-breaker when Samantha mentioned a name I hadn’t heard in a long time.

“I met someone who knows you,” she said. “Brooke Biltmore.”

You don’t forget Brooke, neither the name nor the girl. Brooke was the most social girl in Greenwich, legendarily so. We didn’t have girls like Paris Hilton in my school, but Brooke was the closest thing. She was a year behind me, and she was iconic, fashionable and friendly, and beautiful and sweet. The boys adored her, the faculty worshipped her, the younger girls idolized her, and even the girls who envied her had to grudgingly admit she had it together.

I am ashamed to admit it, but the very idea that after all these years Brooke Biltmore remembered me was a little exciting. I guess we never really do leave high school.

“Where did you meet her?” I asked, nonchalant as I could.

“In Greenwich.”

“Details?”

“Her kids are patients of Andrew’s. It’s a long story, but I met her and she seemed around your age so I dropped your name and she totally remembered you,” Samantha said.

I had to work to keep the pride from showing on my face. “How does she look?”

“She’s gorgeous,” Samantha said, with no hesitation.

“She always was.”

“You can tell.”

“And obviously she’s married with kids and still lives in Greenwich?”

“That’s right,” Samantha said. “She’s married, don’t know much about her husband, but she has twins, I’m not sure how old.”

I nodded. “Sounds right.”

“What was she like in high school?” Samantha asked.

“Exactly the same,” I said. “Gorgeous, with a successful husband and perfect-looking twins.”

“You strike me as the sort of person who wouldn’t care for a girl like that.”

“You are correct,” I said thoughtfully, “but to be fair, she was all right. There was something decent about Brooke that made it impossible to hate her. She was a good person. She was much more real than the average debutante. I’m glad to hear things have turned out well for her.”

Samantha got a strange look when I said that, one that suggested maybe things weren’t as good for Brooke as they sounded, but I didn’t ask. If she wanted to tell me she would.

“What did she remember about me?” I asked instead.

“She said you were really smart.”

That’s what I mean. That’s what I liked about Brooke. Do you think Paris Hilton could tell you which girls in school were really smart? Even if Brooke had more admirers than anyone else, she still knew I was the smart one.

“That’s nice,” I said. “Anything else?”

Now the look on Samantha’s face was even more uncomfortable, and I couldn’t read it at all. Maybe it was connected to Brooke not doing so well. I had to ask.

“What?”

“She said that your father was in jail.”

And there it was.

That feeling. The nervous gnawing in the pit of my stomach, the slap in the face, the redness in the cheeks that followed. It had been a really long time but now it was back. Because, like I said, you really never do get out of high school.

“Well,” I said, “I guess she really does remember me.”

“You never told me about that,” Samantha said. She sounded hurt, and I understood. Not because she had the right to know anything she wanted, but because she felt, as I did, that we shared everything. Only I hadn’t shared this.

“It just didn’t seem relevant anymore,” I said. But that wasn’t true, not at all. When your father goes to jail it is always relevant, even if you live to be a hundred. “Do you want to know the story?”

“Only if you want to tell me,” Samantha said.

“I don’t want to tell you at all,” I said, “but I will.”

Samantha frowned.

“That came out wrong,” I said. “I mean it isn’t a lot of fun talking about it, so I never do, but it’s important to me that you know I’m not keeping anything a secret.”

“Katherine, you don’t—”

I cut her off. “Sit back and relax,” I said. “It’s not a quick story.”

The story is about my mother’s brother—Uncle Edward—who was an enormously rich man and a total cretin. He made his money in real estate, buying decrepit buildings, throwing out the poor people who lived in them, tearing down the buildings, and putting up town houses. It’s perfectly legal, and I suppose you could argue he was improving neighborhoods, but I always wondered where all the poor people went. I asked him about it one time, and only one time.

“Who gives a shit?” was his reply.

That’s why I never asked again.

My father worked for him, in a management role that left him a lot of free time, so my dad was always around when I was a girl, which was terrific. But it was pretty obvious he didn’t love his job, and the summer I turned eleven I found out why. We were at my uncle’s house in Southampton. We visited once per summer, not more and not less, and it was clear my parents never enjoyed themselves, but I certainly did. The house was sensational. It had a pool and a trampoline and my cousins had a playroom bigger than our house. I used to love it there, until the day I discovered the air vent.

It wasn’t actually me who discovered it. My eldest cousin showed it to me. His name was Richard, and I thought he was cool because he looked a little like John Travolta and because he smoked. Richard showed me an air vent in the downstairs playroom where he could sneak a cigarette, blowing the smoke into the air duct. It was genius, and utterly cool.

That year when I turned eleven, I decided I wanted to try it. I knew where to find cigarettes, my uncle kept his on the kitchen counter, and I knew where to go to smoke them. I can still remember my heart beating as I snuck two cigarettes out of the pack and tucked them into the waistband of my sweatpants, then tiptoed down the stairs. There was no one in the playroom. My father and my uncle were the only ones in the house and they’d locked themselves in my uncle’s office, telling me they needed to talk in private and were not to be disturbed.

I slid open the vent that covered the air duct and stuck my head inside, but before I could strike a match I heard voices. They sounded tinny, with a hint of echo, but I recognized them immediately and was easily able to make out what they were saying.

“You’ve never treated me with respect.”

That was my father.

“Don’t make a fool of yourself.”

That was my uncle.

“After the way you’ve treated me all these years,” my father said, “if you think I’m going to get you off the hook you must be out of your mind.”

“Let me tell you something,” my uncle said. “You’ve been riding this gravy train for years. This is the first time I’ve ever asked you to do anything and you will do exactly as I tell you.”

“Or else what? Are you threatening to cut your own sister and her family out of the business?”

“No,” my uncle replied. “That is not what I’m threatening.”

“Then what?” my father asked.

There was a long silence after that. I never heard them say anything else.

A few months later my father went to prison upstate, sentenced to four years for tax evasion. I never told anyone that I knew what happened, and I never read what was in the newspapers. But I did learn two valuable lessons that day. The first is that money without power is worthless. And the other is that there isn’t really anything so cool about smoking. I left the two cigarettes right there in the air duct and shut the vent behind me. For all I know they’re still there. And I never did try a cigarette, not in my entire life.

When I finished the story, Samantha was stone-faced. I could tell she didn’t know what to say.

“What happened after he went to prison?” she finally asked.

“We visited him.”

“And how was that?”

“The jail wasn’t so terrible. Visiting him was like going to a mediocre restaurant for lunch, except that you wouldn’t normally drive upstate to eat at a mediocre restaurant, nor would you leave your father there after you paid the check. That was the worst part. It wasn’t seeing him in there that was so bad, it was getting back into the car without him when we left.”

“What did you talk about when you were with him?” she asked.

“I hardly remember. It feels like a different lifetime, like it happened in a dream.”

“And how about when he came home?”

That was the hard part. “He never came home. He died of a heart attack less than two years after he went in.”

“Oh my god,” Samantha said.

“My mother has never been the same, not even close. She’ll never get over it. I suppose I won’t either. And she and I have always had trouble talking about it, because she says he did it all for me, which seems to make it okay in her mind but always makes it much worse to me.”

We sat quietly in the room, listening to the humming of the machines. Every now and again someone would laugh, or a phone would ring. There was soft music in the distance that I couldn’t recall hearing before. It was almost time to go.

“Let me tell you something, Samantha,” I said. “The lesson in all of it is that money without power is meaningless. So the lesson for you should be to stop apologizing all the time for the way you were raised and all the advantages you had. What you’re doing now is wonderful and there isn’t any way to put a price tag on it.”

Samantha was very still. She didn’t say anything.

“Besides,” I added, “money isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. What makes life worth living is all the wonderful things that could happen to you. Remember that.”

“Are you talking about Andrew?” she asked.

“I am if you want me to be.”

She was thinking of him now, I could tell.

“Samantha,” I said. “Earlier, when I told you Brooke seemed like the sort who’d have the perfect life, I could tell from your face she does not. Right now, I could really use a story about her life that isn’t so perfect. Would you tell me?”

She seemed to think very hard. “Her life isn’t perfect, Katherine, believe me.”

“In what way?”

Samantha put her hand up near her mouth. “I’ll just tell you this, because I don’t want to betray her trust. Brooke is one of those women who judges herself and every other woman based on the men in their lives.”

I nodded. I wasn’t particularly surprised to hear that. “Women like that have always treated me like I’m pathetic,” I said.

“Maybe they treat you that way because they are intimidated by you.”

“Baloney,” I said. “They act as though they consider everything I have a substitute for what
they
have.”

“Maybe
you’re
intimidated by them.”

That slowed me down. “I don’t know. I guess it doesn’t make any difference anyway.”

Samantha came closer and fluffed the pillow at the base of my achy back. “I think there’s a lesson in that for all of us,” she said. “Something about just needing to give each other a break now and then.”

That stopped me, completely.

“Well,” I sniffed, “when you put it that way it sounds so simple.”

Then she sat back down in the chair opposite mine and we waited quietly for the rest of the poison to finish dripping into my veins. It would only be a few more minutes.

BROOKE

SO, I’LL MAKE THESE my final words on the subject.

There isn’t any need to continue talking about it all, because that only serves to defeat the purpose, which is to live. Not just to stay alive, to
live
. As I, and only I, define living. I don’t tell anyone else how they should define it, and I don’t ask for advice, either.

For me, happiness is the only goal I can imagine. I don’t really have any others. Some people pursue happiness in boardrooms or on mountaintops, they spend their lives negotiating and climbing, and it seems to me what they are doing is looking for happiness in the profits and the pretty views. But I don’t need to look so far away for happiness. I have it here, all around me, every day, nearly every minute. I don’t need to accomplish anything in order to feel happy. Happiness is not something I hope to discover along the way to vague, distant goals; happiness is a means to its own end. It
is
the destination, the only one worth striving for, at least that’s the way I see it and I tell my kids that all the time.
The only thing I wish for you is happiness.
I don’t care if they are ambitious, athletic, or academic. I don’t care if they want to be doctors or schoolteachers or garbage collectors; I only want them to be happy. Living happily ever after is always the best ending. Any story that ends differently isn’t worth telling, as far as I’m concerned.