She was the one who always did most of the talking, and her voice was almost completely gone by the time they were seated.
After they had let a minute pass without any of the waiters or waitresses clustered around the glowing screen of the computer in the corner of the restaurant making any sort of movement toward their table, Diane looked over at them pointedly. None of them were smiling, but she hoped that the one who was most actively frowning wouldn’t be their waitress at the exact moment she started walking toward them.
The generosity of the unsmiling waitress’s curves wasn’t fully apparent until she was standing directly in front of their table, nearly grazing it with her stomach, which appeared to be her only flat appendage. The stomach of a woman who hadn’t yet procreated, Diane couldn’t help but note, not without some bitterness.
“Hello, I’m Vanessa, and I’ll be your waitress for the evening.”
Josh gave her a clumsy smile that Diane would’ve found offensive if she didn’t know as well as she did that he would’ve given the same smile to any one of the older or less attractive members of the wait staff still scurrying around the screen.
“I’m Josh, and this is my wife Diane,” he said.
Vanessa finally smiled and nodded in response to this.
“What brings you all in tonight?”
“It’s our first night away from our baby,” Josh said, proudly, it seemed to Diane, as if he thought taking a break was some sort of accomplishment.
“Wonderful,” said Vanessa, going along with it, which made Diane dislike her slightly less. “Congratulations.”
Forgetting that her voice had only a tenth of its usual power to travel, Diane waited until Vanessa was out of a normal range of hearing before speaking.
“Stop telling people that!” she said in a labored, rasping, barely-there voice that sounded painful even to her, even though she knew it didn’t hurt. “People think we have a six-week-old, and like they have to congratulate us or something. He’s almost a year old. Going out for dinner when you have a one-year-old hardly counts as an occasion.”
She regretted scolding him immediately. She was reminded yet again of her most earnestly and privately held belief, that hell was an unending video loop of every mean thing you had ever said or done to anyone you loved, to their faces or behind their backs.
Or at least it would be for her. Who knew what hell was for the waitress with the flat stomach, whose name she had already forgotten.
◆
She wasn’t actually mad at him for telling people that they were on a parents’ night out. What she was actually irritated by was the fact that, even though they were dining out on her recent bonus, the waitresses at the wine and then cocktail bars they had stopped at on the way to dinner had delivered the credit card slips to him for signing after they ran her card. She didn’t mind the mistake in and of itself, but minded terribly that he hadn’t corrected the mistaken parties when it happened, and waited until they had started walking away from the table to slide the receipts over to her for signing. Her voice had been less hoarse when they set out for the night, and though she didn’t directly pin the fading of her voice on the French 77 she had on their first stop or the Bordeaux she had at their second, she did associate it with these perceived slights, unconsciously or not.
Trying not to harp on it, knowing too well by then what came of harping, she took a minute to notice the colorful striped candle that sat burning between them. The wax at the top of the candle, by the flame, was a cotton candy pink, and she decided that if he hadn’t said something interesting by the time the flame reached the green stripe that came next, she would try to speak again, strained voice or no.
If she had known that the cursory fooling around in their hotel room before setting out for the wine bar where the waitress would hand the leather folder with her card in it to Josh had planted the seed for their second son, the candle color system for monitoring how much she spoke would’ve already been a wash. She would’ve had too much to say about the foolishness of throwing a second bomb into the middle of their lives so quickly after they had finished cleaning up the mess the first one had left. Or that she had finished cleaning up, really. After a long protracted fight they would both feel like they lost they would decide to call this second bomb Jude. Jude would lean toward his father in both sympathies and temperament and coloring, but Diane wouldn’t have to work nearly half as hard not to hold this against Jude as she might’ve guessed. Because their first son, Monty, already favored her on all of these fronts, and this seemed fair to her, a perfect one to one ratio. And all she ever wanted—had ever wanted—was for things to turn out fairly, equally, and if she had to advocate for herself from time to time to make sure this happened, well, fine.
Because of the loss of her voice and the color coded monitoring system she invented to protect what was left of it, they would both go on to remember this as the night that he did most of the talking when in fact it was the only true fifty-fifty conversation of their marriage, an inequality she had never considered much because it never seemed to bother him. Outside of that they wouldn’t think of the night much at all, because she would mistakenly clock Jude’s conception to two nights earlier, when they’d made up after the fight she was still apologizing for with all these drinks. And she would work hard to forget the rest of it altogether. At the time she was marking it as the first night she understood why old people become grumpy, which was the other, stronger source of her irritation at her husband. Nobody likes to feel old. She might’ve been able to get a few words in if the restaurant hadn’t been so loud. And while she appreciated that the chair was supporting her weight, it felt a little, that night, like her ass was supporting the chair back. She felt her body working even when she was completely still.
When Josh started to make a throwaway comment about how pretty she looked in the dress she was wearing, which she had purchased because it reminded her of a dress she used to own in a much smaller size, she gave him her best, most winning smile, which hadn’t changed across dress sizes, and said, with as little irritation and as loudly as she could manage, “I’m going to have to give you some prompts, aren’t I?”
◆
“First time you ever got really and truly trashed?” she asked, after his responses to first lie and first celebrity boner had failed to elicit anything interesting.
It was stunning, really, that she had never thought to lead a conversation of theirs with prompts before tonight, as much as she liked to direct things.
Once the presence of a neighborhood friend’s basement and the absence of any compelling female leads were confirmed in the story of his first bender, she stopped listening.
The flame had reached the blue stripe by then.
Diane looked over at a dignified older couple two tables away. They had managed to put together outfits that were high end and fashionable but also age appropriate, which, based on the nine million and one restaurant scans that preceded this one, was astonishingly hard to do. They were more striking than attractive, and manicured to an impeccable enough degree that she could tell from halfway across the room. She noted that his sweater had been knit by hand, and she wanted to spread the woman’s leather jacket on her roll, it looked so buttery. Their bodies were leaning in toward each other like sunflowers to the light. She had always wanted to be like that couple when she was older, more rarified with every year. Of course she did—everyone did. She wondered what they fought about.
Once she confirmed that the stylish older couple had the good manners to speak too softly to be heard from where she was sitting, she remembered to look back at her husband to confirm for him that she was listening to his saga of peach schnapps.
She took pride in how many multiple threads of thought she could weave and still maintain enough of a grasp on a conversation to avoid insult, but Josh always noticed—silently—when even a small part of her attention veered from a story he was telling. He wasn’t sleeping with his secretary yet, but would be by the spring, at which point he would start calling her his assistant, which was the first of many things that would finally tip Diane off to the affair. The secretary cum assistant had excellent listening skills, which he appreciated even more than the fact that she was twenty-five, and had a stomach at least as flat as Vanessa’s.
“So then Frankie said he knew where his dad kept the stuff sorority sisters didn’t watch vagina movies to, and we sent him back to his house to get what we all eventually learned was a very old, very expensive bottle of whiskey.”
Diane gave him a smile that managed to be pleasant at the same time it answered any questions anyone might have had surrounding how she felt about him using the word vagina in polite company. Having confirmed that she wasn’t listening even a little bit—Frankie was his best friend from college, not childhood—Josh decided to make up the most absurd, pointless ending to the story he could manage, but Vanessa came back before he had the chance.
Out of concern for his wife’s tender throat, Josh ordered their entire meal, which seemed to satisfy Vanessa. Less work for her, he supposed. And Diane’s voice really was no treat to listen to, by that point.
Once Vanessa walked away and he turned back to Diane, he realized she wasn’t even pretending to listen anymore.
◆
Knowing that by ordering the entire meal, Josh had erased any possibility of the credit card slip being delivered to her at the end of the night, Diane scanned the room for a distraction big enough for her anger. It would have to be better than the handsome older couple aging gracefully next to them.
She knew, when her scan of the room found its target, that it really was a testament to the old couple, that she hadn’t noticed the beautiful children lacerating each other in the corner earlier. Once she spotted them it was hard to look anywhere else. They were whispering so ferociously that even the hush of their voices felt aggressive—like a sneak attack—full of the kind of fury and resentment that meant they must really be in love. It wasn’t just the scene they were making, though, that made them glow. They were still young enough not to be approaching their next birthdays with any sort of unease, but old enough, certain enough of who they were or wanted to be, that the love they were in might be actual, adult love. Looking at them, you couldn’t help but get the sense that by saying whatever it was they were to each other, and inflicting the kind of damage upon each other they almost surely were, they were derailing something that might’ve held a happy weight in their lives. It wasn’t just the spectacle they were making that made it impossible to turn away from them, but the gravity of the mistake they were halfway through making, evident all over their ravaged faces. The girl’s eye make-up was past the point of repair. She hadn’t raised her voice above Diane’s own wounded, barely-audible pitch, but you could tell how fraught she had become by the steady streams of black mascara that had almost reached the base of her neck. Diane wanted to call out “No!” as much as she wanted to suggest—through an audible sigh, maybe, or pointed eye contact held a beat too long—that they stop making a scene, please. And everyone knew how tasteless Diane thought scene-making was.
Later, looking back on it all at the end, Diane would hope she and Josh had achieved moments that captured the spirit of not only the distinguished middle aged couple, but the disastrous children, too. Passion and dignity, she wanted them both, she really did.
“Okay,” Diane said, flagging down Vanessa to order the bottle of wine she’d just then decided to order. “I’ve got it.”
“Got what, darling?”
She started to bristle at Josh’s use of the word darling—one of a number of things he had started saying or doing ironically, or as a pantomime of an old-fashioned gesture, but that he now employed regularly enough that it was part of his actual, unfashionable character. But once she committed to something it would take more than someone else’s bad habit to deter her.
“Your next prompt,” she said, raising the taste of wine Vanessa handed her with more purpose than she’d done anything all night.
“Okay.”
“Worst break-up.”
◆
“I hadn’t known they made puffer coats in a bright, yellow color like the one she was wearing, but there she was—yellow the color of color wheels in kindergarten classes. Pure, unapologetic yellow. It was impossible to miss.”
Seeing that this particular prompt had captured Josh’s interest in a way all the others had failed to—immediately, the way her flipping to an NBA playoff game right in the middle of one of their movie nights would have, had she ever thought to do such a thing—Diane had meant to pay attention to this one, she really had. But she had to wonder what it meant, that he had started going on about the color yellow right as the flame had reached the candle’s yellow stripe. It wasn’t this alone, though, that kept her from focusing the way she had intended, or even the fact that he had tried to capture the exact shade of yellow that the coat had been with the color yellow itself—a redundancy she had to take a deep breath to keep from calling to his attention. It was the fact that it was clear, from the way his voice changed the moment the coat and its color were invited into the conversation, that yellow held some sort of happy significance for him, and it was a color she never wore, quite pointedly, as it quarreled with her complexion. This struck her, for some reason, as sad to the point of tragic, though it wasn’t the sort of thing that would normally bother her. She had always been a practical woman. Some women wore yellow, some didn’t. So what? There were a million other places he could see the color and be happy on any given day. Maybe it was the lighting of the restaurant, romantic and wistful, that made it feel like anything more now. Maybe it was that her throat finally was starting to hurt, a little, and she was really just feeling sorry for herself and looking for more reason to mope. But really, she thought, it was just that change his voice had made. One, she realized just as Vanessa approached with their appetizers, that she had never heard before.
Diane could hardly believe how happy she was to see Vanessa, as the interruption drew her back to the table, and reminded her to listen. She knew, by then, that there were details of this story beyond the yellow coat that would interest her, and listening would be crucial. She worked hard to smile politely while Vanessa arranged Josh’s fried mozzarella and her kale Caesar in front of them. She betrayed no impatience when Vanessa lingered to ask if either of them would like some parmesan even though it would have been a redundancy as plain as the yellow color wheel on either of their meals.
“So wait, remind me who this girl was, again?” Diane asked as though it held no more significance than the salad she was poking at with her fork, before looking up to try to determine, from Josh’s face, how thoroughly he had already established who the girl was.
“She was a freshman,” he said, “only a freshman,” reinforcing again with that new voice of his, how much more she had been than that.
◆
The truth was, he hadn’t thought of her in years, by that night. She was barely even a memory. Certainly not a regret. He might’ve gone the rest of his life without thinking of the smell of her shampoo, or her silhouette in profile when she turned toward him, hearing him approach behind her—she had always seemed to know it was him. It was shocking, really, how clearly he could see the brick with their initials scratched onto it just outside the entryway to her dorm room, now that he thought about it, never mind the look on her face as she stood outside in the snow that night in the yellow jacket. This last thought, he was horrified to learn, was nearly enough to summon real, actual tears. Imagining what Diane’s reaction to this would be, he coughed on an ambitiously sized bite of fried mozzarella and looked up to give her a reassuring smile.
Having a child had made him a little soft, he had to admit.
He was relieved to see that Diane seemed to be more interested in the salad in front of her than she had been in anything else all night. The next prompt couldn’t be far behind. Maybe the next one would call to mind more pleasant things.
And the prompts would keep coming, eventually finding their place in the family discourse, despite how spectacularly they failed at their outset. Realizing, subconsciously, perhaps, the degree to which they could be used to draw out information a person had no intention of divulging, Diane would use them on both Monty and Jude, a lawyer as much as a parent, always. At first it was parental meddling, maybe, but eventually it became a sort of happy ongoing family conversation with no beginning or end. And standing on the corner where the bus picked them up on winter mornings Monty might say to Jude—it was always Monty who led, and not just because he was older—best Christmas or state you think you’ll move to, a question mark dangling from the cloud his breath had made in the cold. Both of them understood that what he was really saying was mom. Diane would have already been at the office for an hour by then. And even though it wasn’t his game, it would be one of the things Josh would miss the most, eventually, and grow in him a sort of fondness for any question posed. A question mark, written or implied, sometimes felt like a favorite sweater worn in front of a fire.
“I assume if her being a freshman was significant, you were not?” Diane asked. “A freshman, I mean.”
It amazed him, truly, the way her brain worked, even after all these years. How every new fact and piece of information put her in search of others. How rarely her mind was at rest. It was in fact seeing her brain work at the rate it did that had sung his own ambition to sleep, the way watching an Olympic sprinter take off at start of a race gave the hobbyists permission to fall behind. No one really expected much of them anyway.
“Correct, my dar—”
He smiled guiltily, as if she had caught him masturbating in the basement under a blanket she had just washed.
“Yes, my love. Right as always.”
◆
By the time she had given up on her salad—too much dressing, not enough anchovies—the flame had reached the red stripe, which Diane found infuriating, as it meant he had been talking about this girl for two full candle stripes without providing any real information about her. It was as if he sensed how vitally interested she was in what he had to say and, after years of having waited for just such a turn, was acting coy in response instead of letting the story be something they shared.
When Vanessa came to clear their appetizer plates Diane made a point of avoiding eye contact to hurry her along.
“So how was it that you happened to know a freshman well enough that she felt compelled to show up outside your house?” She asked once Vanessa had started her retreat with a larger stack of dishes than Diane would’ve given her to manage.
“Well, it’s a funny story,” he said.
Diane smiled pointedly to show she was game.
“Originally we met because we were both on dishwashing duty in the cafeteria, if you can believe it.”
At this it was Diane’s turn to cough, because she nearly couldn’t. Believe it. She would’ve sworn, before that night, that the man had never washed a single dish in his life. And she was an expert eye witness.
“I thought that was a work study job,” she said, once she had managed to get the offending wine down.
“Well, right. Yes. Normally it is. I had reached a certain level of disciplinary probation that semester—it was my last one, you know, so I was maybe a bit careless in my behavior from time to time. Nothing major. Mostly just harmless bits of fun here and there.”
He paused here to make sure she understood what he meant, but she was staring into the flame of the candle that sat between them on the table, one he found rather tacky mainly because he assumed she would, over-the-top as it was in its colorful stripes. So he fumbled on without waiting for her go ahead.
“But, you know, they couldn’t exactly kick me out. Because of mother, you know?”
Diane raised her eyebrows briefly enough that only Josh could detect with any certainty that she had, not willing to give her mother-in-law much more in the way of acknowledgment.
“Yes,” she finally said, realizing he wouldn’t go on without verbal permission. “I do know.”
And though her voice was tight when she said it, this night would mark a certain turning point in her relationship with her mother-in-law, whose headbands were classic, Diane would decide, rather than fussy. However inadvertent her role had been in the story, her mother-in-law hadn’t been the least of the obstacles this girl with the yellow jacket was working against, Diane knew. Any memory of her and her mother-in-law laughing happened after this night.
“Well, it was kind of fun, really. Happy—that was her name, if you can believe it. Her God given, birth certificate name. She had the kind of hippie, maniacally happy mother who died when she was only a kid, the way you would think only happens in books.”
Diane refilled her glass to keep herself from asking how many books he had read in the last year.
“Anyway,” he said, “Happy used to work in the bar her uncle owned. She went to live with him after, you know, her mother. So she knew her way around a dirty dish. It was like she was unlocking the secrets of the universe, the number of things she knew about how to get a piece of dirty glass clean.”
“So you started dating the girl you were on dish duty with?” Diane asked, hoping this would be the end of it, and doing a quick scan of the room for Vanessa, both to signal for another bottle of red and to signal to Josh to keep it moving.
She needed to know, now, where this was going.
“Well, that was how it started, but it turned out we were in the same poetry class. It was mostly freshmen, but of course I had waited until the last semester to fulfill the university’s English lit requirement.”
“Mmmm,” she said in acknowledgment, relieved that her voice was almost fully gone, by then, which meant she didn’t have to work to keep her tone light, here, completely free of criticism. He hadn’t been hers to criticize, then.
“I wasn’t exactly excelling in the class, I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise you to learn. And she helped me catch up on some of the things I had missed. It turned out she knew about as much about poetry as she did about cleaning plates, and she was just as happy to impart what she knew. We started with the classic stuff that the class covered—the Shakespeare sonnets, the T. S. Eliot. But she had a thing even for the contemporary stuff coming out at the time. There was this big guy from the poetry world—Jesus, what was his name? He was a real big shot—published in the New Yorker, that kind of thing. And he came to campus that fall. It was almost more than Happy could stand.”
Diane was surprised how much it bothered her, that this love affair, or whatever you wanted to call it, that ended in the winter, if the yellow coat was to be taken as fact, had begun as early as the fall. The stack of fresh, unsmudged New Yorkers that sat on their front table at home flashed through her mind. Since having her son she hadn’t read a single article, but she couldn’t bring herself to cancel the subscription. It had never once occurred to her that Josh might pick one of them up, which made her feel—of all things—guilty. It was pretty rich, Josh being able to make her feel the snob. Her undergrad alma mater hadn’t exactly been the kind of place where lauded poets came to visit.
“W.S. Merwin! That was his name. There was this poem. I forget the title, but she loved this one line of it. She always said she was going to tattoo it on her arm. She said it reminded her of her mom. I wonder if she ever did. Uh, how did it go…”
Diane was gathering the effort it would take to speak again, to come up with a new prompt, if she had to, to get him to stop talking about this girl, when the line came to him.
“Loss has a wider choice of directions than the other thing. You know, like once you lose something you think about it all the time, because it could be anywhere or have become anything, or something like that? Not knowing means anything is possible?”
“Yes,” she said, “I got it.”
◆
It was the fact that he remembered the exact line that really got her boiling. She had been sending him out to get two or three stray-but-urgent baby items for a year now only to have him return with half of them, having forgotten the diaper cream or the children’s Benadryl. Apparently obscure lines of poetry were taking up all the mental space he needed for pedialyte and mashed peas.
When Vanessa arrived with one of their entrees perched precariously on either of her delicate shoulders she made a big show of arranging the plates squarely in front of them, as if she was about to present a magic trick. After pausing a few beats too long in between asking if they wanted pepper and if they wanted parmesan, Diane almost laughed when, after they had both answered both questions in the negative, she asked if they needed anything else.
She managed to make her “we’re fine” heard despite the fact that her voice was completely gone, by then, her throat raw.
Knowing an actual smile would’ve gotten him in trouble, Josh let his eyes do the apologizing. Vanessa only shrugged her what’re you gonna do shrug, which had been earning her at least 2% more gratuity than she deserved in the two years she’d been working there, and disappeared with more agility than Diane would have thought possible, given the curves.
Knowing she had made more of a scene than she intended to, even with Vanessa’s graceful exit, Diane took another sip of wine. She was being unfair, she knew. She had been the one to ask the question, after all. She wasn’t really angry that he was going on about this girl for so long, she knew, but that it had taken him so long to tell her about the relationship in the first place.
The truth was, he would have told her all this a long time ago if she had given him enough time or silence to get through it all.
Diane took a deep breath and started again.
“So, if she was such a master of dish work and poetry both, why did you ever let her go?” she asked in a voice that was, by then, truly ghastly, hoping, she realized, that the girl ended up being a monster, in one way or another.
“I didn’t, really. Or didn’t mean to. I got the thin letter, the one everyone dreads, from my top choice law school. Only it was really my only choice, or the only place I had applied to because, you know—”
“Mother,” she finished for him, nodding with her entire head to confirm how well she knew.
“Right. And the truth is, I didn’t even mind. I mean, I didn’t mind the idea of not going. At least not half as much as I minded having to tell my parents. I mean, it was partly because they’d be furious—at the school, not me—but also because, you’d have to be a pretty poor applicant, to get turned away in my position, all things considered.”
“Sure,” she said. And she didn’t even add a barb, here, or mean it two ways, as this was the least surprising part of the story. She really just meant to indicate that she knew what he was talking about, which he was grateful for, being so rare a thing as it was.
“And it occurred to me,” he went on. “All the places I could be or go to or see other than that one lousy school, and it was youngest I’d felt in years.”
It took surprisingly little effort here for Diane to keep from pointing out the fact that that lousy school had, in fact, been the exact place he ended up—it had been the place they met. This was mostly because she had already decided that she was done asking questions or interrupting. She would let him talk as long as he wanted to, and see where he went with this on his own—the parts he thought where the most important. She decided if he was still talking about Happy when the flame got down to the next, orange level, it would mean he was still in love with her.
“It was Happy’s idea, to just say fuck it all, and take off. I was almost twenty-three, by then—I took that gap year, you remember. Way too old to be worried about parents. We were gonna drive down to the city that night. The night the idea first came to us. To her. We were gonna get married in the morning and then head West. It had never occurred to me before that the West was an actual place. I always thought of it as more of a state of mind, or a world view, you know?”
Diane might’ve felt bad, icing him out here to commit to the idea of not interrupting him, if it wasn’t so abundantly clear that he wasn’t actually asking her a question. Or anything of her at all, really.
“I was surprised, how ready she was to just take off and leave. She had worked so hard to be there—a hell of a lot harder than me. And she was a good student, too. Not just with the poetry. For awhile I flattered myself, how much you’d have to love somebody, to give up three more years of college—everybody knows college is the best—but looking back on it, I think she just wanted some family. The uncle, he was kind, you know, not a storybook villain or anything like that, but not enough, you know?”
Diane nodded this time, since he had given her the courtesy of pausing, but didn’t look Josh in the face, too afraid to. She looked past him at the dignified older couple she had been admiring earlier. She felt relieved, at first, seeing them. She and Josh had always liked to linger over a meal, but how much could have changed, really, in the amount of time it took a sensible, older couple to finish their dinner? But after watching them for even a minute—listening to the ease of their silences and seeing the eagerness with which he held out bites of his meal, really wanting to know what she thought of each one, Diane knew with an almost violent suddenness and certainty that she and Josh would separate, because the man with the beautiful, dignified dinner jacket and stylish black frames would never tell his wife a story like this, because he didn’t have one. He had married the girl in the yellow jacket.
The candle was at the purple stripe by then–two levels below the orange one. She wondered if the flame was starting to burn through the colors more quickly, now that it had reached the end of the candle, or if it was just her imagination.
She looked to the beautiful children in the corner next and, seeing they were gone, she looked wildly around the room for them—this was their fault, after all—but they were nowhere in sight. Back at home making love, she decided, desperate, suddenly, for at least one story that ended happily. She wondered if the girl had fixed her eye make-up before they went to bed, or if she would wake up the next morning to find it somehow worse and better than she had imagined it at the same time, or maybe just surprised to find it there at all, proof of how close they had come to losing each other.
◆
Seeing how distracted Diane had become—she was looking almost everywhere but at him, by then—Josh almost didn’t finish the story. But, realizing that he wanted to get to the end himself, he decided just to make it short. To stick to the facts and not rhapsodize too much.
“Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that mother’s impeccable timing is what derailed this whole thing. We had made our plan in Happy’s dorm room. I was going to go home and pack and meet her at the long term student parking lot in an hour. But when I got back to the frat house both of my parents were there. I’d been trying to keep the news from them, but of course they already knew—dad played doubles with the dean of the school for years. It had been an error in communications, was how they put it. The dean of admissions was new, and hadn’t known of the family’s long history with the school. It was so long the dean had thought everybody knew, that it could go without saying. But either way, it was all sorted by the time they showed up that night. So not only did I not have to deliver the bad news I’d been dreading, there wasn’t even any news to have to tell.”
“There was nothing left to run from,” Diane said, looking somewhere far over his right shoulder.
It wasn’t so much that Josh ignored this, barb or no, he wasn’t sure—he was just too close to the end to stop.
“I got so caught up in celebrating I completely forgot about Happy until I looked up and there she was, right outside the window in her yellow jacket. She must’ve waited in the lot for a long time past when we were supposed to meet, because her nose was about as red as her coat was yellow.”
“So if they hadn’t come, your parents, I mean. You would’ve…”
He looked at her as if he’d just then remembered she was there.
“Yes,” he said, “I guess I would have. But they did come, and, you know, they had gone to such trouble to make things right, I couldn’t just take off in the night.”
She managed to nod without giving any indication of actual consent.
“So what happened to the girl?”
She wasn’t sure, as she said it, if she was talking about Happy, or herself.
She wasn’t wrong in predicting that her own marriage would end, but it was another three years before they would divorce. First there was the pregnancy to deal with, and then the baby. And then of course there was the fact that, once he was gone there would be no one to pin the slights of waitresses on other than the waitresses themselves, and she did hate to be rude to members of the service industry. She would eventually come to blame the secretary cum assistant for the divorce, to her mother and sisters and friends. She never so much as cited this night, not even briefly, or in passing, when listing her justifications for breaking up a family that, she had to concede, looked almost too perfect, standing side by side in photos, to make them all stand alone. But years later, on vacation to somewhere warm with her third husband, just after her mind had started to go but before it was far enough gone to consult doctors, she would see a stunning, shaggy blonde little thing in a banana yellow bikini and would swear she knew the girl from somewhere, but never realize that it was exactly the sort of girl she always imagined when she pictured Happy standing outside in the snow, in front of some dumpy, New Haven frat house. She had held an entirely concocted picture of this girl for almost fifty years, by then. One that wavered in exactly none of its details or features. And because she wasn’t able to pinpoint the source of the instant familiarity she felt with the girl on the beach, she assumed the breathlessness that seeing the girl left her with—that uneasy anticipation of wanting something terribly without being able to fully count on it—and an uncomfortably strong tug of nostalgia meant that she recognized the girl from a romantic comedy she had once seen. Her discretion being the last thing she lost, long, long after her memory, she turned quickly away from what she now imagined to be a starlet on vacation wanting a little privacy, and hoped that she and her male lead had found a little happiness somewhere along the way before the movie ended.
Meanwhile he would feel liberated, at first, by not having to hide his fondness for the younger women who reported to him from anyone other than HR. But eventually the listening skills he so cherished in this sort of girl would turn on him. He would start to see them as a demand that he carry almost the entire burden of every conversation, from women who couldn’t be bothered to think of anything interesting to say themselves. Whatever else you wanted to say about Diane—and by then he had said and thought plenty, mostly to these attentive assistants, since even his own mother tended to side with Diane, Diane being quite the donor to the law school herself, by then, just the sort of noble, improbable success story the university so loved—she was always able to occupy herself, and never counted on him to do it for her. And when he did say something that grabbed her back from wherever it was her mind took her, the smile she rewarded his cleverness with, well, it was absolute gold, one of the very few things in this world whose value he was absolutely certain of. Even after all this time, and in spite of all his advantages.
Long before all of that, though, he would walk two miles to get her a cheeseburger just after Jude was born, and would rub her feet, and send away the mean nurse who Diane thought was yelling at her, even though he didn’t think she was.
Vanessa arrived to pour the final half glasses left in the second bottle of wine, and circled the table without saying anything, which only underscored that they had both fallen entirely silent by then. Panicked at the complete absence of anything to say gave way to relief, as Josh realized his wife still had a question dangling on the table.
“I have no idea where she is now. She could work here for all I know.”
He had meant to convey how overwhelmingly uninformed he was about Happy’s whereabouts but realized, as he said it, that it rather emphasized how close she could be.
“But that night?” Diane asked. “What did she do then?”
“Well, she must’ve known from the look on my face what had happened. Or what wasn’t going to happen, at least. Because she left without trying to talk to me, or coming in. We locked eyes for a moment, through the window. Well, for longer than that really. She saw me. And she knew that I saw her. It was long enough, anyway, that mother told me to stop zoning out, the way I do. That that had maybe been part of this whole fiasco to begin with. It was strange though. She smiled at me, before she turned to go. Happy, not mother. And it was a genuinely happy smile. Not bitter or anything. And that was the last time I ever saw her. I looked for her, the next morning. Not to, you know, resurrect the plan. Just—apologies seemed in order. Some sort of goodbye. But she was gone. Not just from her dorm, and the cafeteria. The school.”
Really finished, now, he looked up at Diane for his next prompt, as he always did and always had, even before the day of prompts.
Looking directly into her eyes for maybe the first time that night, Josh must have seen the devastation on her face, Diane realized, because he was quick to add “but that was a long time ago now.” He looked back down again as he said it, knowing how insufficient the line was, and knowing equally well how his wife felt about insufficiencies.
It had started to snow. Knowing how much Diane had always loved the first snow fall of the season, he looked up from the spot at the table he had been favoring in all this looking down and asked her “Shall we go, my love?”
She really did love the first snow fall of every year. And she could feel her pulse in her throat by then, and he knew the precise order of her preferences when it came to cold medicine flavors and brands. The hotel room had been cold when they left, and the sheets stiff and starchy, and probably too cool to sleep on alone. He had forgiven her for the fight the other night so easily—so much more readily than she would have—making all of these drinks obsolete in the first place. And so, when he went to cover her hand with his own, she let him.
◆
Vanessa had been watching them all night, even when she wasn’t anywhere near their table, unable to imagine what a woman as dynamic as Diane, as animated as she was even without a voice, and as inspired in her make-up and wardrobe choices, would be doing with a drip like this guy, some terrible name that started with a J and fit him perfectly. She had them pegged for a grand slam table—two coffees and two desserts and a third unfinished bottle of wine she could take swings of in between cleaning at the end of the night. The kids were with her mother for the night—she could indulge a little. It was the kind of table you only get when two people are utterly done with the evening but not ready to be alone with each other yet. But when she came over eight minutes after he had eaten his last bite of pasta and asked if they needed anything else, they both said no at exactly the same moment.