Best Intentions (8 page)

T
here are times—graduating college and, I am beginning to suspect, turning forty—when there seems to be an overwhelming impulse to either blow up your life or cling to it desperately.

I smooth my dress with the palms of my hands as I near the midtown restaurant's ornately gilded front door. The fitted black sheath has been riding up with every step, creating a shelf of fabric across my hips, a visible rebuke to the good intentions I had when I bought it, determined to lose five pounds. I know, of course, that you should never traffic in the currency of hope when shopping, every woman knows that, and yet. When I was younger I was convinced that the right outfit, the right lipstick, the right attitude could change the course of a first date or sway the mind of a man I felt slipping away. I'm older now, I know better. Still. I run my fingertips through my hair. It's not that I feel a need to impress Jack, not in the way that Deirdre does, but I want to be as close to my former self as possible, perhaps we all do, to at least fit into the outlines of who we were when we knew each other best.

I push open the restaurant's heavy door.

An hour ago I sent Sam a text message with its name and address but got no reply.

I hold on to what his assistant told me like a stone in my pocket,
turning it this way and that, hidden from view. I will pull it out when I am ready, or when I can no longer bear it. For now, the secret weight of it is the only comfort I have. The timing will be mine.

I walk into the hushed entryway and my eyes take a second to adjust to the purposefully faded light. It's a curious choice for tonight, the kind of place given to company dinners and out-of-town tourists, a onetime clubhouse for mayors and tycoons when cigars were still tolerated and women only barely, a ridiculously expensive place with a highly recognizable name and mediocre food. There are a zillion pricey restaurants in New York renowned for their chefs' culinary creativity that I'd love to try—this isn't one of them. Jack doesn't live here and he must think he's making some sort of statement with his selection, though I fear it is not the statement he intends. I worry that Deirdre will be snarky about it or assume it is vested in irony, though I am certain it is not.

The maître d' leads me into the darkly lit oak-paneled dining room and I spot Jack alone at a corner table, sipping a drink, his eyes on the door, steady, vigilant. He is wearing an expertly tailored suit; his dark hair, still curly, is cut short. Even the cocktail before him—a martini, straight up—is, for some reason, jarring. But what did I expect, that he would be chugging dollar drafts from a keg? The past and the present overlap and separate like shadow puppets. We are grown-ups with all the accoutrements and the responsibilities; we are not.

Jack smiles broadly as I approach and as he comes into sharper focus I can see the early etchings of lines fanning from his eyes. He stands in the self-conscious way of a man with perfect but assimilated manners. “Lisa.” He kisses me on the cheek. “You look wonderful.”

“You, too.”

“For someone my age,” he jokes.

“Oh please, no qualifiers tonight. At least not before I've had a drink.”

“That can be arranged.” Jack motions for the waiter, assuming the role of host like a mantle.

I forgo my usual glass of white wine in favor of a martini, too. I have never had the world's greatest tolerance for alcohol but this seems as good a night as any.

“Is Sam meeting you here?”

“Yes. He's flying in from Chicago. He said he'd come straight from the airport.”

“What was he doing in Chicago?”

“A story.”

Jack nods and doesn't ask anything further. His ready acceptance, his apparent disinterest are a relief to me. “It's nice to have a few minutes alone together,” he says.

I smile. “Yes.” In some ways we had the easiest connection of the zigzagging loyalties that once bound the four of us and eventually sent us lurching apart. Our link was the least fraught and when it frayed it was due to the natural effects of time and distance rather than a conscious break.

Now, sitting beside him, I can see that he has lost none of his earlier tensile muscularity. After hours of predawn practice, days, nights on rickety buses, Jack had gotten a tennis scholarship to come east, as far away as he could get from a small northern California town and a family life he rarely explicated beyond alluding to an ill-defined roughness. At five-ten he wasn't as tall as some of the other players, nor did he have their natural grace and ability, but he made up for it in intensity. Jack wanted, needed, to win more than the country club tennis boys who populated the Ivy campuses then. The one thing I never sensed when I watched him play, accompanying Deirdre during their early courtship, sometimes even going alone to his matches, was joy. Rather, it seemed that he had looked around, assessed his abilities, weighed them against the competitive landscape and calculated that this was his clearest advantage. He knew the value of his talent, but I'm not sure it ever really made him happy. I don't suppose that was the point, though. Jack, at nineteen, twenty, had an unambiguous understanding of what it meant to win, there was none of that theoretical, wifty new-age stuff for him; it was elemental, winning meant you had a better score. He never lost his
temper on the court the way others did, spurred by testosterone and the McEnroesque fad of vitriolic outbursts; whatever volatility he possessed, and it was there, I'm sure of it, was turned inward. Jack, when he erred or lost, turned silent. I wonder, sitting in this outdated, stuffy restaurant, if he is still infused with that absolutism or if, like me, he has discovered how much harder it is to be certain of anything now.

“Thank you,” he says, touching my hand lightly with his fingertips.

“For what?”

“For coming tonight.”

“Of course.” I smile. “I'm so glad to see you. Five years is too long.”

After a number of embryonic post-graduation years with no contact—why, after all, would he want to be in touch with the best friend of the woman who had so thoroughly rejected him?—there came a gradual détente. I sent Jack a note telling him of my marriage, we began to call each other every now and then, and eventually the advent of e-mail made curiosity and nostalgia so much easier to indulge in. Sometimes I feel like an emissary, keeping him updated in carefully managed snippets of Deirdre and Sam's doings, and vice versa. But I don't really mind; there is a way in which I am able to let down my guard with Jack that is hard with more recently acquired friends. We know who we were, where we started from. There is no need—or ability—to pretend.

Until now.

I feel the stone, turn it in my hand, cold and hard and smooth.

Anyway. Five years ago, when Jack married a perfectly nice young woman named Alice eleven years his junior—annoying on principle—Sam and I went up to Cape Cod for the wedding. I was surprised by his choice, but then again, I had never seen Jack with anyone but Deirdre; I didn't know if she was a precursor or an aberration, I didn't know his pattern. On paper at least Alice and Deirdre seem like polar opposites, Alice a quiet, somewhat ethereal academic working on a PhD in, I can't remember, something to do with Re
naissance literature, and Deirdre, who is, well, not. When Jack and I danced in the billowy white tent redolent of wet grass and spilled Champagne, he quizzed me about Deirdre directly for the first time and, safe from the harbor of his new marriage, asked that I send along his regards.

“Who the hell gets married at twenty-four?” Deirdre remarked when I got back to the city. “I did,” I reminded her. She rolled her eyes. “Well, you. You're different.” I wasn't quite sure what she meant by that but I figured it was better to leave it alone. “Let me rephrase the question,” she continued. “Who the hell marries a twenty-four-year-old?” I was about to say, Jack. Men. But being reminded of the male prerogative in this regard is never pleasant, especially not when it is an old boyfriend, even one you gave up years ago and have barely thought of since. (And yes, I know women are doing it, too, but please, spare me the chapter and verse, it's not the same.)

Still, when I told Jack the following year that Deirdre's father had died, he called her and they have been speaking and e-mailing intermittently ever since. She and Jack had such a combustible breakup that it is strange to think of them sliding into this kind of easy cordiality. Deep down I'm not convinced that first love can be rendered so even, so free of the tentacles of memory and regret. Then again, I may have a tendency to overestimate the effect of a college romance after nearly twenty years. Though for many it becomes a lingering obsession with the one that got away, for others it is apparently little more than an anecdote, a curious if dim moment frozen in time, the feelings no longer accessible or even comprehensible once the erotic fog has lifted. Who knows? I'm certainly no expert. I married the one who got away.

“It was daring of you to arrange this,” I say.

Jack laughs. “Well, turning forty calls for a grand gesture, don't you think? It seemed, I don't know, symmetrical to spend it with you. We were together for my twenty-first birthday, after all. The age of consent meets the age of decrepitude. And since I was in the city…,” he adds, taking cover in convenience as if he needs to be a little less naked.

“Oh God, I remember your twenty-first birthday. We went to that truly horrific Chinese restaurant out on the highway. I remember your twenty-second, too. I don't think I've ever been so drunk in all my life.” Things were already unraveling then; Sam and I entered our period of doubt; Jack, accepted early to Harvard Law, had proffered Deirdre the invitation to go with him that had morphed into an ultimatum hovering between them like a double-edged blade. That night we raced toward each other because in each of our hearts we knew that it was ending. “It feels like a lifetime ago,” I say.

“Sometimes it seems like yesterday to me. In some ways it feels more real than anything that followed.”

“I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. So. How did your interview go this morning?”

“Pretty well, actually.”

“You still won't tell me who it was with?”

He shakes his head. “I can't.”

“C'mon, I'm good at keeping secrets.”

“Since when?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You always did have a fatal tendency toward honesty. Maybe it's those earnest big brown eyes of yours.”

“Earnest? Is that how I look? Not exactly the compliment a woman is hoping for.”

“I meant what I said. You look wonderful.” He smiles. “All I meant was that it's an endearing quality but there are times when a certain amount of discretion is called for.”

“People change.”

“Do they?”

This is not a line of conversation I'm in the mood to pursue. Besides, I don't know the answer. I wish I did. “After all your years in Boston, why are you thinking of moving here now?”

In truth, I suspect that he had given Deirdre Manhattan, deeded it to her and was wary even to visit.

“I don't know, I guess I woke up one day and realized that if I
stay there I will be doing essentially the same thing for the next twenty years. The thought gave me the chills.”

“That's what this is all about, a midlife crisis? Thirty-nine is too young for that.”

“I'm turning forty.”

“Haven't you heard, forty is the new thirty?”

“Thank you for reducing my life to a cliché.”

“Sorry. That's not what I meant. You know what your problem is? Too much early success. You shouldn't have made partner so young. It didn't give you anything to aim for.”

“There's always something to aim for. Sometimes it presents itself and sometimes you have to go looking for it, but there's always something more.”

“I suppose. But the problem with that way of thinking is that it makes it impossible to ever be satisfied with what you have. How does Alice feel about it?”

“I haven't told her.”

“What do you mean, you haven't told her?”

“This afternoon's meeting was merely a preliminary conversation. I don't want to get into a big argument over something that might not happen.”

“Would it be an argument?”

“Probably. Look, it's no big deal. I just don't like dealing in hypotheticals.”

“For all you know she's dying to move,” I reply. “It's easy to assume you know what the person you love is thinking, but what if you're wrong?” I am shadowboxing with the wrong shadow, I know that, but still. “Where does she think you are?”

“What is this, twenty questions?” He takes a breath, exhales. “I told her I was here to see a client.”

“Jack, that's awful.” And then, only sort of kidding, “Do all men lie?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” I feel the martini coiling around my defenses, loosening them, a dangerous solvent on a loaded night.

“Is everything okay with you and Sam?”

“Yes. Of course.”

Jack nods but he is suddenly distracted and I know without turning around that Deirdre is walking toward us.

It is what he has been waiting for.

Deirdre looks, quite simply, gorgeous. Her long hair is loosely blown out into soft waves; she is wearing a jewel-toned dress with a draped neckline that shows just enough to be enticing, and its billowing sleeves keep Ben's fingerprints safely under wraps. I watch Jack and Deirdre hug, step back an inch, reassess and smile deeply as they sit down.

“I can't believe you remembered this place,” Deirdre exclaims. “I forgot all about it until I walked in the door.”

“I don't remember us being here,” I interject.

“We weren't. I mean, you weren't,” Deirdre says. “Jack and I were.”