After the Reunion (3 page)

In the car, creeping along with the rush hour traffic, Emily thought:
I’m famous. I’m Ken Buchman’s wife and Kit Barnett’s mother. My freshman advisor back at Radcliffe would be thrilled
.

The kitchen smelled delicious. “Doctor Buchman called,” Adeline greeted her. “He has to meet somebody and he says to start without him and save him something.”

Emily’s heart sank. “Did you remind him the children are coming?”

“He remembers.”

The last several times Ken had had “meetings” they’d lasted until ten or eleven o’clock, and he’d come home surly and refusing to make conversation. She’d been so sure all that with his women was over, but now she wondered. What else could it be? Dermatologists didn’t have meetings, and they didn’t work until eleven o’clock at night. Maybe he was just having a drink with another man at the Polo Lounge, the way he sometimes did; but it was inconsiderate of him to do it when the children wanted to see him, too. They always ate at seven so Adeline could get home. A person could certainly have enough drinks by seven o’clock. Well, she wasn’t going to argue with him. She would do her best to make it a pleasant evening for everyone.

“Hi, Mom! Hi, Adeline!” Peter, her tall, tanned, handsome son, smiling.

Adeline put her palms together and bowed the way Ed McMahon did on the Johnny Carson show. “The Little Prince!” Adeline said, and bowed again. Peter laughed and hugged her. He let Emily hug him.

“You’re looking beautiful, Mom,” he said. “What’s for dinner?”

“Your favorite things and a surprise,” Adeline said before Emily could answer.

“I saved you all the copies of
The Wall Street Journal,
” Emily said.

“I have my own subscription now,” Peter said cheerfully. “The Little Prince is going to be the little tycoon. Or big tycoon someday, I hope. Where’s Dad?”

“He’s going to be late,” Emily said.

“Something I said?” Kate asked, smiling, slipping into the room like a wraith. A head taller than Emily, but still fragile-looking, with a froth of dark hair and big gray eyes, she looked a lot like Emily did at her age, minus the fear. The shrill voice of her babyhood was gone—that piercing, demanding little voice that had driven Emily to distraction so many years ago—replaced by an interesting husky tone. That was one of the things that distinguished her from other young actresses, but even more importantly it was her eyes; something mysterious and withheld, a challenge; even though her manner was friendly. Emily was aware of this on the screen, as was everyone else, but she also saw it in her own home, and she knew it was Kate’s look; there was a place beyond which you could not go.

Kate gave Adeline a quick hug, suffered her mother to hug her, and put her arm around her brother. “Let’s have some wine out by the pool,” Emily said. “It’s so pretty this time of the evening.”

They marched out with a carafe of white wine, glasses, and a cooler, and arranged themselves in front of the sunset. Emily noticed for the first time that there was a bruise on the side of Kate’s face, as if someone had struck her. “What’s that?” she asked, alarmed.

“What’s what?”

“Your face. It looks as if you hurt yourself.”

“Oh, I have no idea,” Kate said calmly. Her voice made it quite clear that she was not going to discuss it.

“How’s work?” Emily asked quickly.

“I’m up for something, but if I tell anybody I’ll jinx it,” Kate said.

“Well, I have my fingers crossed. You tell me just as soon as you know.”

“I will.”

“I have a chance to sell my car to a girl at school,” Peter said. He took a sip of his wine. “What kind of wine is this?”

“Just jug wine,” Emily said.

“Oh. Anyway, I was thinking, then I could buy a used BMW and learn to fix it.”

“You’re too young for such an expensive car,” Emily said. “We’ve talked about this already.”

“But it would be good for me to learn how to fix a car. If it was my own car I’d have an incentive.”

“I want you to spend your time studying, not fixing cars,” Emily said.

Peter sounded pained. “I get all A’s. You said if I sold my car I could have another one.”

Where’s Ken
? she thought.
I hardly see him anymore. I miss him and I want to be with him and it isn’t fair
. “I thought we decided you were going to get a Toyota,” she said.

There was a silence while Peter mused on his fate. “Do you think a white car is too feminine?” he asked.

“Too feminine?”

“Yes. Girls have white cars, and so do fags.”

“I go out with a man who has a white car,” Kate said languidly. “He’s not a fag.”

“Maybe I’ll get a white car and have the windows tinted black,” Peter said. “That would really look great.”

“How are you going to see?” Emily asked.

“You can see,” Peter said.

“Oh, rub my back,” Kate said. “It’s killing me.” She bent over double and Peter began kneading her shoulders. “Mmm … that’s great,” she said.

“I wish I had my own money,” Peter said. “I wish I were phenomenally rich.”

“You will be,” Emily said encouragingly.

Peter smiled. “Then I’d get a glamorous beach house, a gorgeous live-in girlfriend, an expensive sports car, and a killer dog to protect it all.”

“You’ll get them,” Kate said.

“Well,” he said, “I’m trying.”

“Dinner is served,” Adeline called cheerily.

They went into the dining room, bringing what remained of the wine. Emily had put one of her white orchid plants in the center of the table, and around it had arranged small, fat white candles. She lit them now, and dimmed the light in the overhead chandelier to a faint golden glow. The room looked very pretty and she wished Ken were here to make the evening complete.

“I’m starving,” Peter announced happily.

Adeline came in bearing a huge platter of her famous oven-fried chicken, surrounded by mounds of corn fritters.
I didn’t know she was going to fry everything
, Emily thought in dismay. She noted with relief that there was a large glass bowl of salad on the sideboard.

A glare of bright light hit her like a physical assault. Adeline was standing by the dimmer on the wall, and had turned the overhead light on as high as it would go. “If I cook, you’re going to
look
at what I cook,” Adeline snapped. She stood there, arms folded, thin lips pinched in a straight line, waiting for any backtalk. Of course there was none. They all smiled at her and began to eat heartily in the blinding light until she was satisfied and went back into the kitchen.

Emily was furious, but she knew there was nothing she could do. Ken would never have let Adeline get away with it, but then, Adeline never tried anything like this when Ken was around. When Emily tried to complain to Ken he just told her she ought to be able to control her own help and was acting ridiculous. Kate was giggling. She thought Adeline was hilarious; the more outrageous Adeline was the more Kate loved it.

“Adeline, this is delicious,” Peter called.

“When you’re rich and have your beach house I’m going to give her to you,” Emily whispered. Kate stifled another giggle and Peter just kept on gorging himself.

They had finished dinner and were having coffee when Emily heard the sound of Ken’s key in the lock. “I’m here!” he called. He put some packages down in the hall and walked into the dining room. How tired he looked! He still had the boyish, sandy-haired looks that belied his age, but now instead of compact and athletic he seemed too thin. She wondered with a little start of fear if all this time there had been something physically wrong with him, some secret, almost unnoticed illness, and that was why he had been so irritable.

But he wasn’t irritable now; he was charming with everybody. He pushed his food around the plate and ate nothing, but Emily pretended not to notice so he would stay this sweet.

Kate and Peter left soon after dinner, both with work to do; both carrying the boxes of food that Adeline had left for them before she went home. By the time Emily had turned out the lights and set the alarm system Ken was already upstairs.

“What did you buy?” she asked him cozily, as they were undressing for bed.

“What?” he asked—that strange, irritated voice again, like a stranger.

“Those packages,” Emily said.

“Oh, just some socks.”

“I would have bought you socks, Ken. You should have told me.”

He turned quickly and glared at her as if he wanted to strike her. “Can’t I even buy my own socks? Can’t you let me breathe?”

She felt as if she were going to cry. “What did I do?”

“Stop whining.”

“I’m not whining. If I’m whining then I’m
sorry
I’m whining. I’m just upset because you’ve been acting so weird lately. You’re so unpredictable I don’t even know how to talk to you anymore. Everything I say or do seems to make you mad at me.”

“Go to bed,” he said, dismissing her. He put on his swim trunks.

“What are you doing?” she asked stupidly.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m going for a swim.”

“Ken,
please
talk to me. If something’s upsetting you I want to help you. Do you feel all right? You look sick … I don’t really mean sick, I mean … not well.”

“I’m fine.”

“Would you tell me if you didn’t feel right?”

His face flushed with rage, actual rage. What had she done now? “Shut up,” he said. He left the room.

Emily stood there with her arms wrapped around herself, shivering. Her teeth were almost chattering. Why did Ken act as if he suddenly hated her? Maybe there was another woman again, but maybe this time he was in love. It was possible. He was forty-seven, at the vulnerable age when men started to feel their own mortality. There were all those beautiful younger women everywhere he went, and who wouldn’t want Ken? This time it might not be just cheating, not just a fling; it could be serious, and he’d want to get rid of her, the old, boring wife …

Maybe he was dying and didn’t want her to know. But their family doctor would have told her; the wife had to be told, even the old boring wife he wanted to be rid of.… No, she knew Ken well enough to realize that if he loved her so much that he wanted to protect her then he wouldn’t treat her the way he was now.

Their bedroom terrace overlooked the swimming pool. Ken had turned on the lights all around the pool and in the water. She went out on the terrace and looked down at him, a dark little figure in the water, tossing up glittering spray, plowing through the rocking waves he was creating, frantically doing laps. Back and forth, back and forth, seemingly tirelessly, as if he had to exorcise a demon. It was cold out here in the night; Southern California was desert country. Emily began to shiver in earnest.

He apparently had never noticed Kate’s bruise, and she and Ken had become such strangers to each other that she hadn’t even mentioned it to him after Kate left. What was happening to them?

Her husband was exorcising an unknown demon, and she was in the desert. She was all alone.

Chapter Two

Annabel had always been blessed with beauty, intelligence, good health, and an almost euphoric joy in the anticipation of the possibilities of life. She loved people, parties, adventures, champagne, sentimental little objects, sex, and romance. All her life strangers had turned around to look at her, especially men; partly because of her striking auburn-haired looks, and partly because it was unusual and pleasurable to see someone who looked so happy.

So when she started her own business she knew that because it was going to be an enormous amount of work and take up nearly all her time, she determined to do it only if it was fun too. She had been earning enough for her needs working as a buyer at Bloomingdale’s, but she had become bored. Walking to and from her job she would look at the little boutiques, particularly the ones on Madison Avenue, and think idly how she would have done that window differently, or carried more interesting merchandise; and eventually the idea took hold that she really wanted to have a boutique of her own.

There was one she’d particularly had her eye on, in the Seventies, which carried very expensive, very tacky evening dresses, the kind worn by old ladies who also wore henna-colored mink coats. When she saw a sign in the window that it was going out of business she wasn’t a bit surprised, because she figured their clientele had probably all died off. She went immediately to the real estate person and embarked on the first business deal of her life.

Her father had left her a significant amount of money. She used it as collateral against a loan, named the new boutique after herself, and began demolition and renovation. She wanted it to be comfortable—the sort of place customers would stay in for hours. There were nice dressing rooms with good chairs to sit on, and plenty of hangers, and best of all, room to move around. Everything was done in white and no-color beiges, with slightly tilted mirrors to make you look tall and thin, but not so distorted that people would get home and decide the dress that had looked so chic in the store was really a mistake.

She remembered when she was a little girl her mother had taken her to stores where models actually came out and modeled clothes for you. At the time that had seemed very glamorous. Now it was an artifact of the past, but she intended to recreate it. And there would be tea served in the afternoons, with little sandwiches and pastries, and in the mornings of course there would be coffee and croissants. Never mind that the maid who brought these refreshments into the dressing rooms was the same kid who unpacked and hung up the stock, or that the model doubled as the salesgirl, or that Annabel hovered around giving all that nice personalized attention to the clients because she couldn’t afford
two
salesgirls … when her boutique finally opened it was a success.

None of this would have worked if it hadn’t been for the clothes, or Annabel’s sense of style. The talent to put together a marvelous-looking outfit from a bit of this and a piece of that, which had started her on her career so long ago, was still Annabel’s strong point. She could tie a scarf just so, add a belt, take something away, put an Anne Klein jacket with a Perry Ellis skirt and prove that the colors and patterns blended perfectly. Her stock was not large, but it was eclectic, from Chloe to unknowns from SoHo. She might show up at work in an Adolfo suit with a T-shirt under it. “Why not?” she’d say. “Fashion is to be enjoyed.” And because she did enjoy it, and wore her clothes with such flair, people came out of her boutique having bought much more than they’d intended to but happy about it.