By Rosemary Walsh
Sometimes on summer evenings, I sit on the porch and watch the lake hold the sky’s last light like a mirror. The frame of trees goes black; the first lamps come on in the cottages across the water. There are still shouts and splashes from children taking last leaps off docks hidden in shadows until, from the houses, the calls begin: come in, dry off, change, eat.
It is the hour when adults put on light sweaters, feel the sun flush in their cheeks and the water-fatigue in their eyes, start the coals for grilling, pour drinks, sit on the porches with their feet up on the railings and watch their own view of the darkening shore. The liquid in the glass is meant to divide the hot conviviality of the summer day from the contracted society of the supper table so that a certain level of haze sweetens the evening with the promise of solitude or sex or sleep.
All day the business of the lake has kept thought at bay. Now the children are showering out in back; someone is slicing bread in the kitchen; the neighbors have withdrawn within the rails of their own porches; there is time until the coals are ready.
Of course, over here there are no children; no one is cutting bread in the kitchen; and while there is solitude, there is no longer sex, nor, no matter the level of fatigue, the certainty of sleep. Over here, it is the hour of intrusion when regrets and questions slither into the mind through the usual cracks: a voice across the water with familiar rise and fall, the smell of something savory grilling on a nearby porch, even the taste of the wine in my glass, reminding me of the wine we used to drink on this porch in long-gone, less solitary summers.
As far back as I can remember, there was the lake. Our summer child lives, my brother’s and mine, revolved around it, even though we went there only on weekends, crossing the border from our southern Connecticut home into New York State. I remember those days as simply golden. Did it ever rain? In memory it seems we jumped off the end of the dock into the water on Friday afternoons, swam out to a raft anchored in the muddy bottom and never emerged until late Sunday night when we were piled into a car, water-logged and sleepy, to begin our week-long exile.
The cottage belonged to my father’s sister and was not much more than a log cabin at the end of a rutted dirt road through the woods. The small house had a rough-hewn railed porch and a scraggly lawn--half dirt, half grass--sloping down to an old dock. The cottage had running water and electricity but no toilet. A call of nature meant mounting outdoor stairs to a hillside privy, complete with a double-holed wooden seat, spiders, and the stench of lye. It is an indication of what those summer days at the lake meant to me that I, the most squeamish of children, bore this deprivation without complaint although after dark I made my mother accompany me with a flashlight.
Just after I graduated from college and moved to Manhattan, my aunt died and left the cottage to my brother and me, and my brother, having moved on to rented beach houses, ceded it to me for a dollar. It was probably not worth much more, but I used my first bonus to put a toilet in the tiny bathroom and I gradually began to fix and refurnish and use it as a weekend getaway and a place for small parties for my friends from the city, college friends who, like me, had come to Manhattan to work, people I met at my publishing office or at parties, a fluid group of ten or fifteen people who for a little while were young and poor and festive together. Looking at an album of pictures taken on those summer evenings, I am swept back to the living room as it looked then, to the aroma of pork roasting in the oven, to people sprawled on sofa and floor drinking wine around one of those slatted coffee tables bought in a Bronx factory with a couch, two chairs and a lamp for $118.00 plus delivery. One of the things I kept when I began to fix up the cottage was the player piano. It had only three tattered rolls: “Sidewalks of New York,” “O Solo Mio,” and “The Air Force Hymn”; and someone was always playing one of them, pedaling furiously to keep the tinny music flowing behind the laughter.
Although the faces reshuffle from week to week, there are two people who were constant and seem to figure in every snapshot I have. In the early days of their marriage, my best friend Emma and her husband Daniel drove up from their West Village apartment almost every summer Saturday.
Daniel was not handsome, but he had strong features, a slightly jutting underjaw and coarse, tightly curled black hair that, as he grew older, grayed without losing its essential darkness. Standing next to his height and solidity, I always felt the full message of his maleness. He could be, often was, detached to the point of rudeness, but when he wanted something, he turned his “big guns” on you and became incredibly seductive, irresistible in fact. Under the force of his dark gaze, compelled by the cogency of his expressed desire, you found yourself doing what you had promised yourself, two minutes before, absolutely not to do: you got in the car and went to listen to Brazilian music which you hated; you drank a glass of a rare old brandy although you knew it was one glass too many; on the verge of pneumonia, you arrived to make a fourth at a restaurant dinner. It was probably this power that eventually made Daniel a successful investment banker, and it certainly made him the overtly dominant partner in his marriage to Emma.
Emma, to give her credit, picked her issues carefully and, for the most part, held on to a way of life that suited her very different personality. She had unusual thick blond hair that had been the color of caramel when I first met her all those years ago on the library steps at Bryn Mawr. It lightened into a pale oak as she grew older, and she could lift the long thatch with one hand and swirl it into a perfect coil at the nape of her long neck. In a moment, she could plait it into an elegant French braid that fell down her back over the olive green or tan cashmere sweaters that she wore like second skins. She had, unusual in a blond, brown eyes, deeply hooded by thick lids. Very early in their marriage, she relinquished the kitchen to Daniel, but controlled the rest of any place they lived as easily and as beautifully as she threaded her hair. Her long thin hands made magic among flowers and set elegant tables for his meals; then she was content to curl up among pillows like a graceful snake and provide her guests with wine and conversation until the meal itself was ready.
Back at those summer parties at the lake, Daniel always brought the best wine, elevating the plainness of my roasts and stews with good wine that was cheap by today’s standards--an excellent bottle of French red cost less than three dollars. He kept a remarkable wine diary. After a meal, he would meticulously soak the label off the bottle, paste it in a loose-leaf notebook, and write the date, the price, and a brief critique. Usually, he would add a few lines about the locale and the meal and the diners, just enough to give a flavor of the gathering. Read over a period of time, the diary provides a history of his and Emma’s social circle that spiraled upward in a manifest destiny unequaled by any of the rest of us. And very soon the entries in the wine book reflect a widening world indeed: summer addresses all over Europe honing in finally on France, its bountiful South, and eventually an apartment in Nice owned jointly with a partner in Daniel’s firm.
Daniel had also become an accomplished cook. I miss the evenings in his and Emma’s last house in a Village mews when she and I sat at the kitchen table, drinking kirs amid the cats, while Dan moved among his pots conjuring for us one of his amazing dinners and only occasionally shouting at Emma to bring him the ricer or explain the loss of the tarragon that was usually right on the counter beside him. To watch his complete involvement when he prepared a meal and to eat the resulting feast was a delight and even though this culinary bent was, in one sense, the cause of all the trouble, I remember every meal he ever prepared for me.
By this time, some ten years after Emma and I graduated from Bryn Mawr, they were very well-off and I saw them less frequently than I had when they had been part of the group that gathered at the lake. I, who supported myself in the lower rungs of publishing and lived in a walk-up on the unfashionable Upper-Upper East Side, would have called them rich. But they did not consider themselves rich, not in comparison to the people they now socialized with, and there was always a hunger in them, I think, to live with wealth as casually as their friends did.
Dan and Emma were generous hosts. Their meals were usually successful, always delicious, and richly boozy from the aperitifs through several wines to the brandy. Their guests were uniformly interesting, exotic, at least to me, and Emma and I usually outlasted everyone and made drunken admissions to each other into the wee hours of the following day.
Of course, we did talk at other times. The two of us sometimes vacationed together and often told each other the intimate confidences of our friends. I could sit down for dinner at her house and realize that I could send each of the guests into deep shock by revealing something that all of the others did not know, even those who were married to each other. What apples of discord I could have tossed into those feasts, labeled not “to the fairest” but “abortion,” “affair,” “ cross-dresser,” “maxed-out credit,” “bad Scotch in good bottles,” “still loves her first husband.”
For twenty-five years, I thought there was probably not an idea in Emma’s mind or mine that was not eventually transferred to the other’s. I would have said, in that stretch of time, that nothing could happen that would sever us, that we were closer than sisters, stauncher than spouses, more true than the most devoted of lovers, that our friendship was not subject to the treacherous tides of emotion or events that often washed out the ties of kinship and marriage. I would have sworn that we would always be there for each other.
I had another life besides the one in New York and the one at the lake, for I had, like most people, a family and, like most of the people I knew in New York then, that family was somewhere else. Our families lived where we went for holidays and weddings and funerals, where we went with an initial anticipation of a community from which we could not be excluded and from which we fled in a few days clearly aware of why we did not live in that town among those people, why we belonged to that large demographic: non-native New Yorkers.
Yet it was inside this family that I discovered the other strong relationship of my life. In my small Connecticut hometown, I found another Emma. Not that I recognized her right away; Cassie, my niece, was almost eighteen before I really saw her at all.
Talk about butterfly; talk about swan.
First, she was a round, cloth doll of a child with a Raggedy Ann smile and bobbing blond curls. Then she was a teenager, almost matronly in figure, plain of face, with a long mop of spiraling hair blow-dried into straightness every single morning. When she began to perform in school plays, I made a point of attending, to give female support in what was essentially the male-dominated culture of her home. I was surprised into interest by the confidence of her stage self; she bloomed under the lights, even managed to get my brother, her father, to pay attention to a child who was not a football player.
Still, we really never connected until my father was dying. I spent the days of that motionless week with my brother and sister-in-law in the intensive care ward of the local hospital. At night, we sat around the TV with my nephews, taking comfort from proximity like puppies in a box. Cassie was never with us, separated herself from us right after dinner. Yet I knew she had not gone out because her parents would not allow it in this time of grief. I went to look for her.
At the top of the stairs, I heard the music from her parents’ bedroom and found her on their bed, the weird blue glow of the TV the only light in the room. I stood in the doorway and felt her separateness from the group downstairs. Clearly her real life, like mine, was elsewhere. And I noticed that she was slimmer, her face seemed to have lengthened. There was something tawny and alive about her hair, lately allowed to assume its natural curl. I felt an interest rise in me, the way the first lines of a story catch an editor’s eye, make her read on almost against her will. I was suddenly seized by a wave of compassion for Cassie’s isolation, her inability to absorb comfort from the physical circle of the family downstairs. On impulse, I went into the room, stood beside the bed, looked down at her stretched out there in the icy flicker of the TV light.
Out of nowhere I said, “You know I’ll always be here for you.”
She looked up at me and nodded, accepted my statement as if it had some previous context. Of my life, she knew little then, but I think the main point about me for her as for some of my other relations was the fact that I was not there. One of my younger cousins once told me that when I graduated from college and announced that I was not coming home but going to New York, the news had passed among them like a mantra: “She’s not coming back here.”
He said that it dawned on them for the first time that you could do that and live and even come back for holidays, get hugged and fed, and go away again.
After that, Cassie and I began to exchange phone calls, visits, letters and, eventually, e-mails. We kept in touch during her college years in Washington, continued through her graduate studies in Boston. When she finally came to New York to begin her professional life in advertising, I was delighted. No more trains to D.C. or Back Bay; instead we began to see each other regularly at restaurants or at each other’s apartments for long conversations usually centering on one of her many intense, complicated romances.
The Raggedy Ann doll had grown into a stunning woman, her plumpness changed to slimness in gyms and road races, her mop of hair professionally cut and highlighted. She had acquired a patina of style that literally turned male heads on the street. In the right colors, her eyes turned olive. In the right mood, her smile compelled attention.
By the time she was twenty-eight, she had been engaged four times, pulling away in each case from the final commitment. There would be the flurry of the engagement, and then there would be the phone call, “Aunt Kate, I’m sorry to be calling so late. I just have to talk to you. I’m so upset.” And another love story would come to its close. In the small hours of the morning, I heard it all and knew in each case that the faults of Kevin and Tony and Justin and Will were only half the story. In each case, my beautiful niece had deliberately begun to undermine the relationship long before it crumbled. Sometimes I thought she pulled down these houses in order to prevent the other person from doing it first. But to tell the truth, I was always somewhat relieved. Of these four men and all the others in between, I never felt that any one of them was her equal. It seemed to me that Cassie had never met her match.
Over the years, I also made several liaisons, one, the last, of some endurance, but none of them held. I had a destructive itch that began when things were too smooth, too calm, and I never failed to scratch it. God help the man who made me content; his name was writ on water. Finally, when the last man had packed up his things and driven away from the lake on that rutted road through the woods, leaving me on the log-railed porch, half regretful, half relieved, I concluded that I would not try to blend my life with anyone else’s. If love stopped in, he was welcome to stay, just overnight and without baggage. I could, I felt, build a quiet, happy life as long as I had the work that gave me satisfaction and independence and the friendships I had been weaving into my life for so many years.
When technology freed me from the necessity of being at my publishing house every day, I sold my tiny co-op and went to live at the lake. Some small success, some small inheritance, some small investment made me able to renovate the cottage, winterizing it and updating appliances and plumbing so that it became a comfortable if not luxurious year-round home; it was not much more than the fabled forty-five minutes from Broadway by train so I did meet people in the city, but, more and more, my real life centered on the lake.
I loved seeing the seasons change around it: the first yellow haze on the willows that dipped long fingers into its waters; the rich green ring of trees surrounding its high-season summer life; the bitter-bright colors of autumn flaring and fading as the year wound down toward the holidays. Most of all, I loved the winter. In this little corner of New York, we were well below New England weather so that it rarely snowed though some years the ice was thick enough to bring parties of skaters, bright-capped and scarfed against the blackness of the deeply frozen water; but, truthfully, I was happier when there was no ice, no snow, when I could sit inside by my wood-burning stove in the silence of a brown winter. Then I fed the small colorless winter birds and they stayed with me, hopping around the feeders on my silent porch while I worked or read or thought in the precious peace.
I was not, however, a recluse, by any means. I went into the city almost every week: to my publishers; and, of course, to meet Emma in midtown for long, long lunches and the people-centered conversations we never grew tired of; or to go downtown to Emma and Daniel’s for their famous dinners often staying overnight in their Village brownstone; or to go uptown to Cassie’s apartment in the newly gentrifying East Eighties often to meet her latest young man, sometimes just to talk for hours about everything either of us had on our minds.
There were other people I saw in the city, other people I invited to the lake, but as time went on there came to be these three strong currents that carried my life along. I had my long intimate sisterhood with Emma; I had a relationship with Cassie that, without the guilt and resentments that so often cloud that primary tie, was almost like mother-daughter; and I had the place where I had at last rooted so deeply and peacefully: I had the lake.
One evening just after my fifth Christmas at the lake, Emma called to invite me to a dinner party. She and Daniel had gone skiing for the holiday and she was hoping to extend the season with a Twelfth Night dinner highlighted by Daniel’s roast goose and figgy pudding. “And Kate,” she said, “I’m going to invite Cassie and what’s-his-name. I can’t keep up with her men. I think it’s ridiculous that we’ve never met. All these years. All those stories. Is that all right with you?”
My response was not complete surprise. It was not by accident that Emma and Cassie had never met. But the strength of my feelings did surprise or perhaps even dismay me. It was not all right with me. I did not want to bring Emma and Cassie together. It says little about my faith in myself and even less about my faith in them that I feared their forming some kind of bond that would affect my place in each of their lives. My whole life I had clearly demonstrated very bad judgment when it came to men, but thought I had excellent instincts for friendship. I decided I would trust them and myself. Besides it was only a dinner party.
“Stefan,” I said. “The current guy is Stefan; at least it was yesterday.”
But Stefan and Cassie couldn’t attend Emma’s dinner; instead, a few weeks later, Cassie invited me to a dinner of their own in her apartment on 86th Street where Stefan had recently moved in. I thought the evening would give me an opportunity to get to know him, for Cassie would be passionately engaged in cooking.
Outside, the night was frigid; a cold wind wailed by the twelfth-floor windows, the glass steamy from the pots on the stove. We had the delicious feeling of being safe inside, isolated in light and warmth above the dark and icy city streets.
Stefan and I sat at the small wooden table under a hanging glass lamp while Cassie moved from counter to stove, bowing into the steam of the pots to season, stir, or taste, a slight frown reflecting her complete concentration. Finally, she bent to a low cupboard, pulled out a large cast-iron skillet, swung it onto the stove, lit the gas under it.
Stefan had stopped talking. His eyes traced her progress: the slide of butter into the pan, the toss of garlic cloves, the sizzle as the thin scallops of veal met the hot black iron. The aroma of butter, garlic and searing meat rose in the room. Stefan turned and saw that I was watching him. He shrugged, smiled crookedly, and said, “All those little movements. It’s very sexy.”
I laughed, pleased that he felt free enough to say it to me. And it was true. There was something very sensual in the deep physical involvement of the cook in the ritual movements of the cooking. I had seen this before sitting under the lamps of another kitchen watching another weaver of culinary spells. It came to me in a rush of recognition. Watching Cassie cook was exactly like watching Daniel: very sexy.
That dinner was in February. The following May was unusually warm and one Sunday, finding Emma and Daniel at unexpected loose ends and chafing in the city heat, I invited them for a day that would culminate, as usual, in Daniel cooking us a dinner. In the early afternoon they drove their green Jaguar convertible up my recently paved road through May woods sweet with new leaf and white blossom. I went out to meet them as they parked under a half-bloomed tree.
“It’s twenty degrees cooler up here, I swear,” Emma said, sliding languidly out of the driver’s seat, pulling a leopard-patterned scarf off her pale gold head.
“This was a wonderful idea, my dear.” She hugged me.
“Shall we give the chef a hand?” Arm in arm, we turned to help Daniel lift his bags and packages, redolent with promise of delights to come, out of the trunk and carry them up to the cottage. As we climbed the scraggly slope, I was about as happy as I remember being.
You know how it is with happiness: your life is going along in a pleasing pattern; you are, if not ecstatic, content; if not rich, wealthy enough for your wants; if not robust, healthy enough for your age, no shadow on the X-rays, no ominous spike on the blood pressure meter; and then, one day, you take a step too far into the street; you push your shopping cart down the wrong aisle in the supermarket; you decide to take the 11:10 instead of the 10:40--and nothing is ever the same again.
On that May afternoon, with the sun shining through the pale green lace of the trees around the lake, with my best friend curled in the cushions of the porch hammock, waiting for conversation, with Daniel muttering and slamming drawers in the kitchen in the usual prelude to the satisfying aromas of the meal we would eat later at the candle lit kitchen table of my much-loved cottage home, I took that one step into the street, turned down that wrong aisle, took the 11:10.
Actually I answered the phone.
“Kate? It’s me, Cassie. Would it be OK if I came up this afternoon and stayed over? That rat Stefan just informed me he’s going to LA for a meeting. Can you believe this? On such a gorgeous weekend, he’s just dumping me here and going to California. I have really had it with him. I’ll tell you all when I get there. I just so much want out of this city right now; it’s a soot oven, I swear. Is it OK? I mean, do you have plans...?”
I wanted to say I was sorry; I had guests; I had plans. I was looking forward to the afternoon with Daniel ricocheting around the kitchen and Emma and I lolling on the porch and the long evening around the kitchen table. It was all so familiar and comfortable. Cassie would bring a new and foreign energy into our easy trio. But the almost-mother thing clicked in. Cassie wanted to come, needed to come. I couldn’t say no just to protect the leisurely pace of my afternoon.
“Listen,” she said, knowing my weak place, “I’ll cook you the greatest dinner. I’ll bring...”
“No,” I said, cutting her off. “Come but bring nothing. I have a cook here already. You can be sous chef for Daniel. You know, Daniel, Emma’s husband.”
It suddenly occurred to me that this might work out very well. Cassie and
Daniel could bond over cooking, Emma and I could talk the afternoon away, and we could all enjoy the evening.
“OK, but are you sure? Am I barging in?”
“Just come,” I said.
*
So she came, all tawny hair and toned body, all compelling smile and olive eyes. “Here’s Cassie,” I said to Emma, who gave her a long measuring look and then a hug. “Here’s Cassie,” I said to Daniel. “She’s going to help you in the kitchen. She’s a cook, too.”
He didn’t like it. He drew himself up to his full dark height, challenged in his domain by a young blond woman in white chinos and a clay-colored T-shirt. “You cook?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she answered, moving toward the stove. “What is this?” She bent over a pot, instantly engaged. “Is this a ....?”
“It’s my own recipe,” he said. “I take ...”
I left them to it, pulled Emma back to the porch. This would be all right, I thought.
What was left of the May afternoon passed pleasantly. I remember Emma was a little quiet, a little distracted, and once she broke into the middle of my story about a colleague to ask, “Just how old is Cassie now?” Surprised, I answered, “Believe it or not, she’s a ripe old thirty-one,” and went back to my gossip. At about seven, I decided to see how the dinner was coming. I left Emma in the dusk of the porch and walked through the shadowy living room to the kitchen, stopped just short of the light from the kitchen door.
They were bending over a steaming pot, his dark head almost touching her lion’s mane. She shook some spice into the pot, stirred vigorously with a wooden spoon, laughing at him in the raucous way she had stolen from her father’s genes.
“I am telling you it is going to be so much better now.” She pulled back the spoon to avoid his grasp.
“And I am telling you that you are ruining a masterpiece.” But he was
laughing, too, reaching around her to claim the spoon.
“Wait! Wait! Wait!” She backed off from him, hands in front of her.
“Just taste it. Go on, taste it now and tell me that it’s not better.”
She dodged in front of him, dipped into the pot, and cupping her other hand under it, raised the spoon to his lips.
He stopped. Their eyes met. He placed his hand under hers and together they guided the spoon to his lips. She leaned in to encourage him, mouth open in anticipation of his approval. They stood there with the spoon between them, their eyes locked over it, and then slowly he raised it to his own open mouth.
It was as intimate as a kiss.
I turned from the kitchen door, went back through the living room, out onto the porch where Emma lay staring at the lake, one hand idly pushing her hammock against the railing. Sunset tipped her oak hair with red gold, and she looked, as always, sinuous and self-contained as a brown-eyed snake. I sat down in a chair opposite her. This was Emma to whom I told everything, but I could not tell her that what I had seen in the kitchen alarmed me, that I was as reluctant to share my impressions as I would be to tell her I had set fire to her house.
“What’s the matter? “ she asked. “You look so agitated. What are they doing to your kitchen?”
“They’re... seasoning things. They’re arguing about it.”
“Who on earth would dare to mess with anything Daniel does in the kitchen? As a matter of fact, I expected him to have thrown her out by now.”
She frowned and began to climb out of the hammock. “Maybe we should go and make sure she’s not been stabbed with a chef’s knife.”
“No, “ I said. “She can take care of herself. Stay here. They’re almost done.”
I walked away from her, down the steps of the cottage, across the sloping scraggly lawn to the dock. I went out to where the end jutted into the blackening water, stood where years ago my brother and I used to jump off, holding our noses, yipping with delight as our bodies broke the cold surface.
For a wild second, I imagined myself doing that now, jumping in, swimming away from the three people I had left up there in the cottage.
But, of course, in a minute, Emma was calling me to come back and open wine for a pre-dinner drink, to join the other two around the dinner table while they served us the dish they had concocted together. Really, nothing more happened that evening. Perhaps Daniel teased Cassie a little too intensely about her addition to his recipe; perhaps her responding laughter was a little more hectic than necessary, her color a little higher than warranted by the warmth of the evening or the wine; perhaps Emma grew quieter than usual as the meal progressed. Maybe I drank a little too much; maybe my perceptions were skewed by the uneasiness I had felt at the kitchen door. I do remember one moment when Daniel and Cassie laughingly clinked glasses across the table. As the glasses touched, Emma’s hooded eyed flickered from Daniel’s face to Cassie’s and back again. Then she looked straight across at me and her eyes were as black and hard as two pieces of coal.
*
That summer, I traveled around the country for my publisher, and in August I went to France to stay for three weeks with a man who had been my lover and was now my friend. He wanted me to work with him on a book he was writing and offered hospitality in return. It was an excellent barter; we had a good time and did some good work. It was Labor Day before I got back to the lake and I had long put aside any apprehension about that dinner in May. I had been in touch with Emma all summer by e-mail, had heard less frequently from Cassie. I was ready to get back to my well-ordered life, my carefully built world of work, peace, and friendship Cassie’s call came first. Her voice had the high, taut timbre of someone who has something she would rather not say. I flinched under the assault of that bright, rushed voice.
“Listen, Aunt Kate, I need to tell you that I’m going away for a while; I’ll be out of reach, but I’ll e-mail when I can, I promise.” The voice stopped, left silence on the line, then hurtled on. “I’m going away with someone, someone who’s become very important to me, someone I’ve been seeing for a couple of months. I’m going away with Daniel.”
It isn’t as hard to entertain the incredible as you might think.
“Cassie,” I said when it had all been made clear. “You can’t be doing this. Emma is my closest friend. She’s like my sister. You cannot be going away with Daniel. He’s Emma’s husband, for God’s sake.”
“I know he’s Emma’s husband. Believe me, the one thing I know is that he’s Emma’s husband. I know I may be making a big mistake, and I know this will be a problem for you, seeing us together.”
I had a vision of the green Jaguar convertible coming up my road, parking under my tree, the doors opening, and the driver getting out, pulling a scarf from her blond hair, Cassie, not Emma, hugging me, and both of us turning to Daniel pulling grocery bags out of the trunk. I felt a coldness in my bowels like the presage of illness.
She was going on, “Look, I can’t help it. I know he’s too old for me
and I know he’s a bad risk but...”
“What do you mean he’s a bad risk?”
“Well, for God’s sake, you know about all that. You’re so close to Emma and Emma knows all about it. I mean you’ve always said that you guys tell each other everything.” She fell into silence.
“Cassie, what the hell are you talking about? What is it that Emma knows all about?”
“His past. His affairs. It’s always been with women closer to his own age, clients, people he met at professional conferences, like that. Even so, after I found out, I was surprised you ever put me in his way. I mean, you know me and you know him...”
But, no, of course I didn’t know him at all and not knowing him meant not knowing Emma either, and that, not knowing Emma, was the worst thing of all.
“Cassie,” I said choking on that tight stinging feeling that climbs up your throat just before you cry, “if that’s true, how can you go off with him? How can you tear up all these other relationships when you know you may just be one of a string of...”
“I know that this is going to sound stupid, but he says this is different and I hope with every breath I take that it is different because I never wanted anything so much in my life. I’d give anything, Kate, anything. Besides, he’s never actually left Emma before, and we have something he’s never had with anyone else.”
“And that is?”
“We cook,” she said.
*
My first impulse, as always, was to call Emma to pour out my remorse and concern as the only balm I could offer. I thought of all the hours we had spent dissecting other people’s tragedies, savoring detail and relishing speculation. We had made many a meal of the scandalous behavior of our friends and acquaintances. This time we would share a cold dry dinner indeed, but I felt our closeness would enable us to comfort each other. Besides, there was something I had to know: what had Cassie meant when she said Emma knew, had always known, about Daniel. That simply could not be. What Emma
knew I knew. It was one of the foundations of my life.
I called all of her phones, e-mailed over and over the urgency of my need to contact her, but for days all I got was an answering machine, no longer in Daniel’s voice but in hers, gone flat and curt, “Please leave a message.”
I left several, but it was a long agonizing week before she called me back, surely the longest gap in communication between us since the days before e-mail when we sent summer letters on fragile airmail paper. It had always given me joy to see the red and blue edged envelope with Emma’s thin slanted writing bringing me Par Avion a long message from Monaco or Corsica or Positano. I have a box of them still in the bottom drawer of my dresser.
“Kate,” she said when she finally returned my call, “I realize we have to talk.”
“Emma,” I said, “come up to the lake. Come and stay as long as you like. Surely it would help to sort all this out--the way we always do.”
“Our sorting out has usually been about other people. This is different. Frankly, Kate, I don’t know if I can stand to see you. That may change, but right now I don’t have the energy to deal with the fact that Cassie is your niece.”
“Let me help you through this, Emma. Help me through it. Please let’s meet somewhere.” Into her silence I said, “Emma. I beg you.”
*
We met, at her insistence, not at my home or hers but in a small Italian restaurant on Eighty-first Street where we used to go after we had been to the Met. At lunch, it was dim and quiet and only half full. We sat in the dark-paneled room at a table across from the bar. We drank persecco from fluted glasses, ordered pasta and salad and a bottle of Chianti Classico and Emma flirted a little in French with the handsome young waiter who turned out to be Rumanian. It was all so familiar.
It was all so strange.
Over lunch, she told me what I think is everything. Daniel had always been unfaithful; she had always known it. In the beginning she had protested and he had repented, but in the face of his frequent flouting of promises, they had reached a compromise that suited them both. She would not leave him or bother him with questions or recriminations; in turn, he would be discreet, never involve himself with any friend or acquaintance, never frequent places where any of their friends were likely to be. He would provide for her every desire; they would continue to live an expensive, enviable life, travel and socialize together as they had always done. The women who attracted him, he told her, were not young ones who might be looking for a lasting relationship or marriage, but rather women his own age, worldly, professional, successful women who were not looking for permanence, who often had as many reasons as he for secrecy.
“We also promised never to tell anyone with whom we both socialized. And so, my dear”--she looked at me across the table out of those hooded brown eyes, that day neither warm nor hard, just very, very remote--“you had to be out of the loop. Of course, I always wanted to tell you, especially in the early days when I was still hurting, but you know very well that even if I had been willing to break my promise, it would have been the end of the three of us ever being able to be together.”
I saw the truth of it. The context of our friendship was Daniel cooking down in the brownstone kitchen while we talked up on the parlor floor or Daniel gone early to bed while we stayed at the kitchen table in winy conversation or, as I now knew, Daniel seeing other women while we lunched in Manhattan or toured Prague or went to the theater in Dublin. If I had known about Daniel, that life would have been lost to all three of us.
“I had everything I wanted: beautiful homes, a magnificent social life, travel, clothes, jewelry, splendid food and wine, and, yes, sex. That never changed. Daniel”--she paused--“has an extraordinary appetite--for everything. You are thinking that I didn’t have fidelity, but you and I have spent many hours discussing other people’s lack of that rather overrated virtue. I had a perfect life until you brought Cassie into our...”
“How could I know? You never told me. You never warned me. You often said
you wanted to meet her.”
She put up her hands to stop my words. “You’re right. It isn’t your fault that Daniel has lost his mind and run off with... Have you talked to her?”
“Once. She said she’d be out of touch for a while, but she’d see me when they get back from wherever they’ve gone.”
“They’ve gone to California. What do you mean she’d see you?”
I didn’t know how to answer that so she went on, a hectic edge to her voice. “You don’t mean to sit there and tell me you’re going to see her again.”
“She’s my niece. She’s family. Of course, I’m going to see her again. Not both of them, Emma--I can’t imagine that at all--but Cassie, surely you can’t ask me not to see Cassie again. I’m not going to judge her: I’d have to be a real hypocrite to do that. I’ve had my share of affairs, as you of all people know.”
Her voice did not rise but it intensified as if she had begun to shout. She leaned across the table and for a hazy minute I thought her tongue flicked out at me like fangs. “Not with my husband, you haven’t. You were always safe because we had our devil’s bargain. Now Daniel has broken that bargain and he will pay dearly for that. I hope your precious niece doesn’t expect him to be as rich as he was when she decided to take him away from me. If you see her, she’ll convince you to see him and before you know it, it
will be the three of you around the dinner table and I will not have that. Be very clear on this point, Kate; much as I love you, close as we’ve been, if you see her, you will not see me.”
*
We paid the bill; actually, she paid it and I let her. We went out through an empty dining room in a flurry of “grazie, Signora” and I realized we were the last customers, the ones who were keeping the restaurant from closing until dinner. How long, I wondered, had we been sitting there seeing no one but each other while the room emptied around us and the waiters shifted from foot to foot willing us to be gone.
We stepped out into the late afternoon. A light rain had fallen, coating the pavement with a dark glaze. Wind, coasting across the park from the West Side, brought a chill message: somewhere up the Hudson autumn was beginning.
I turned to Emma. I wanted to say something but I found I had no energy left, not even enough to say good-by. She stood looking at me, the pale gold of her hair flattened against her face by the wind. “Maybe I’ll change my mind,” she said, “but for now I’m just going.” She turned and started toward Fifth Avenue, her light lemon coat a bright column against the blackened pavement. I watched it fade at the corner where I knew she would hail a cab to take her down to the Village.
The rain began again. I stood there a long time letting the gray day hold me, letting the thin rain seep into my cotton jacket until I was cold and wet all the way to my bones. Zero at the bone, Emily Dickinson says somewhere.
That was it: zero at the bone.
*
I never really made the choice that Emma asked of me, the gift of fidelity that she had not asked of Daniel. I could not promise Emma not to see Cassie, and Cassie, it turned out, would not see me without Daniel and I could not do that either.
Sometimes I still go into the city for a long lunch with someone who is not Emma, and sometimes I spend a conversational evening with a young colleague who is not Cassie, and sometimes I go to a home in the Village and have a dinner cooked by someone who is not Daniel. At other times I sit on the porch at the lake in the evenings, drinking wine, listening to the sounds from other cottages, letting the questions held back all day seep into my mind through those insidious cracks.
I had tried to fabricate a family to replace the one I moved away from and the one I chose not to create, a family based, not on blood ties, but on circumstance, affinity, affection. It is after all how marriages are made--which perhaps explains the rate at which they fail. Emma was not my sister; Cassie was not my daughter. When the crisis came, there was no blood to bind us, and what we had, or what I thought we had, was not enough. In the end, it all came down as easily as a spider web is swept out of a corner, the fragile, finely wrought weaving reduced to a piece of dust caught in the turning spikes of a ruthless broom.
Sometimes I am overwhelmed with sorrow, wishing I had made a choice, had kept one of them in my life; sometimes I suspect that I may have gotten exactly what I wanted, me, alone, at the lake.
