All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (2 page)

As she’s driving, that song pops back into her head again. “If I should call you up/Invest a dime/And you say you belong to me/And ease my mind/Imagine how the world could be/So very fine/So happy
together
!” In the privacy of the car, Janice tries singing the tune out loud, thinking that maybe this will release her from its grip, but instead she just sounds ridiculous (she never could carry a tune).

Randy—that was the name of her mother’s boyfriend, the one who gave her the album; she remembers it now. They must have been living, where, Indiana? Michigan? Sometimes her childhood feels so out of focus. After her parents divorced when she was seven and her father moved off to Ohio (where he promptly died in a car accident), Janice’s school years were spent drifting around the Midwest, as her mother found and lost work, and moved them from decrepit apartment to the spare bedroom of a relative’s house to motel and back again. Mostly, her mother worked as a cleaning lady for the enormous homes on the shores of the Great Lakes, dusting porcelain knickknacks and polishing mahogany. After school, Janice would often sit at the kitchen tables of these grand houses, watching her mother mop floors, and feel a sense of protectiveness (
Her
mother! Cleaning
their
toilets!) but also shame (Her
mother
! Cleaning their
toilets
!).

From those years, Janice acquired a taste for gourmet food—tinned sardines and salty caviar, boxes of water crackers and hand-cut Italian pastas and briny cornichons, which her mother fed her as an after-school snack from the pantries of her employers. Sometimes, when no one was home, she would wander through the palatial bedrooms upstairs and linger in the girls’ rooms. These were studies in pink, always, and she would examine their contents like a visitor to a museum: postcards from summer vacations in the south of France, stiff sateen-upholstered daybeds heaped carelessly with porcelain dolls, snapshots of boyfriends strategically stuffed into the carved mirror of a vanity. Mementos of lives lived without fear or pain or
worry.
Before she left, she would occasionally take a souvenir—a mohair sweater, a silk blouse with a loose button, a scarf of snagged cashmere extracted from the bottom of a forgotten pile. She could never wear these things outside, of course. She kept her purloined wardrobe in a cardboard box at the back of a closet, behind the secondhand corduroy skirts her mother bought for her at Henny Penny’s Shop-n-Save, and played dress-up as a treat for benchmarks achieved: an A on her French exam, a date at the drive-in, a scholarship offer to a good college out West. With the expensive fabrics against her skin, she would imagine herself propelled toward some shiny future that winked at her from a distance, like a mirror catching the sun and reflecting back the promise of a more perfect life.

Her senior year, she reluctantly sold her collection at a consignment shop in order to help cover the car payments for their sputtering Buick, just a few months before her mother’s latest useless boyfriend vanished with the keys. One kleptomaniac done in by another. In retrospect, she can almost laugh at the irony, although it certainly didn’t seem funny at the time.

the monumental iron gates of the country club loom on her left as she leaves town and enters the foothills, with their pine forests and wildflower-filled meadows. The Forest Heights Country Club, once an estate owned by a tycoon who made his fortune selling shovels during the California Gold Rush, is situated on two hundred acres just north of town. Its meandering gardens have been replaced by a golf course; the stable has room for twenty-eight mounts and an equestrian ring out back; and a phalanx of tennis courts flank the two Olympic-sized swimming pools. The estate’s sprawling stone mansion is now the club’s main building, and from its grand ballroom—kept in its original, parquet-floored grandeur, and normally used as the club restaurant—you can look over the grounds, an expanse of manicured green that rises up to meet the sky.

Janice parks her SUV in the side lot, already filled with the cars of the morning golfers, and walks out toward the tennis courts. The
pock-pock-pock
of tennis balls bouncing off clay echoes across the grounds, but when Janice arrives down at the courts Beverly is nowhere to be seen. Janice waits for her at the edge of the courts and watches Linda Franks rally with Martha Grouper. Back and forth the ball sails, and Janice averts her eyes from the women’s frantic lunges, wondering if she looks as stiff as they do when she plunges after a ball. Ever since she pulled a ligament in her elbow in the spring tournament, she’s grown more aware of her age, of the vague creaking in her joints and the slowness of her muscles to fire.

Martha finally sends Linda flying backward in pursuit of a perfectly sliced backhand, then walks over to the low fence and leans toward Janice, gesturing her in close. Horizontal sweat lines dampen the yellow knit of Martha’s tank top, marking the exact location of the folds of her stomach. Janice unconsciously touches her own belly, which is definitely pushing against her waistband but has not yet succumbed to gravity in the way that her rear end and hips have. Fifty is looming, just a year off now, and she sometimes thinks she can see her looks falling away by the day. Men don’t stare at her on the street anymore, the way they used to. Worse, she and Paul haven’t had sex in six months, and although he’s been overwhelmed by the IPO and she hasn’t felt much of a sex drive herself, she can’t help but worry that he has stopped desiring her altogether. Tonight, she thinks. Tonight she will initiate it.

“I bet
you’re
in a good mood today,” Martha says, pushing up her visor and dropping her sunglasses down so that she can peer directly into Janice’s eyes. “It’s all over the news. They’re saying you’ve gone Forbes 400—what, trillionaires?”

The number, Janice has already calculated in her head, is actually around $300 million—it is surreal to even summon up the figure—but she wouldn’t dare tell Martha that. Still, she can’t quite prevent the grin of embarrassed pleasure that pinches her face. “Oh, please. We both know it’s just numbers on paper. Stock options are just accounting figures, not actual money.”
Yet,
she thinks.

“What on earth does a person do with so much money?” Martha marvels, as though it’s an utter mystery to her, despite the fact that Janice knows that Martha’s husband, Steven, a venture capitalist specializing in wireless technology, has already made his own fortune. (Their vacation home in Aspen has eight—
eight!
—bedrooms.) Nonetheless, Martha’s question has crossed Janice’s mind many times lately. Not that the Millers
need
much, but suddenly they have been catapulted into that upper strata of Santa Rita society that can have
anything it wants.
What Janice has told no one—not Paul, not even Margaret, the one person who she thinks might appreciate this—is that when she imagines what she might afford now, the only thing she truly covets is art. A painting. Specifically (and yes, it’s ludicrous, but…) she covets a van Gogh, one like those she saw a few years back when they last visited France. Janice had spent a rainy day at the Louvre by herself—Paul was back at the hotel taking business calls—and had felt a curious sense of liberation as she walked the great halls alone, addressing the stoic museum guards in her somewhat rusty French. Egyptian antiquities, Greek sculpture, Italian Renaissance, Impressionism: She took in each one in order, spending no more than ten minutes in each room, making sure not to skip the smaller galleries, carefully noting every important piece. She wanted to absorb it
all,
methodically, sequentially. But when she got to the van Gogh exhibition she came to a dead stop. She had seen photos of his work before and found them interesting, but this—the paintings themselves—was something else entirely. The violence of the paint applied in furious layers so thick that she could see the impressions of the artist’s fingers, clawing at the canvas—she felt like she’d been slapped. The color! As vivid as a hallucination. There was something wild and abandoned in that gallery, and she stood there, trembling, unable to leave the room for well over an hour. She never made it to see the Dutch Masters.

She imagines one of those paintings hanging over the mantel in her living room and shivers at the thought of what it might let into her home. Not that they could (or should) buy an $80 million painting. Still, they could start with a minor drawing—like the landscape study she earmarked in the Sotheby’s catalog last month—and work their way toward a collection. They could become patrons of the arts, even start a foundation, and she could take guided tours across Europe to really cultivate a discerning eye. She envisions paintings in the de Young Museum limned by placards boasting
From the Collection of Paul and Janice Miller.
A suitable title for a generous life, well-lived.

Regardless, the truth is that what she might
buy
with all that money sometimes feels besides the point; mostly she just likes to think of this money as a safety net, vast and tightly woven, a guarantee that from this point on everything will be okay. Her children will never have to worry about money, ever; they will never suffer the gnawing panic of wondering where the rent will come from, the way she once did.

Everyone always says that the early years of struggle are the happiest, but Janice knows better than that. A photograph in an old album of hers shows Paul in the tiny peeling bathroom of their very first apartment, the one above the dry cleaners in San Francisco that smelled like mold, extending his fingertips so that he is touching both walls; the grin on his face says, “Look at me, slumming it!” But Janice remembers taking that photograph and thinking,
He has no idea,
even as she laughed along with him. Because in the morning, he would leave for his job and she would be alone in that depressingly familiar apartment with Margaret, a fussy and demanding baby even if she was the first of their friends’ children to toddle and talk, and that sense of shared adventure would dissipate. She battled an oblique discontent, a sense that she had run up against a wall without any doors, and even though she had every reason in the world to love where she was—beautiful baby! charming husband! a whole apartment of her own to work on!—somehow she didn’t feel satisfied. Perhaps it was just the couch? If they could just get rid of that avocado plaid Sears couch and get a nice leather one? The miscarriages came, then, one after another, like a punishment; and Paul began to work longer and longer hours, pulling himself rung by rung up the corporate ladder, a snappish companion even when he was home to admire the secondhand side table she’d spent all day decoupaging. It wasn’t until later—when they’d bought their first house, had some money to spend and room to breathe, gave up on a second child—that she discovered a sense of peace. Janice can remember a morning, their ninth anniversary, when they went up in a hot air balloon over the Napa Valley, on an obscenely expensive whim, and she looked over at her husband and realized that his eyes were bright with excitement and free of worry, and he looked back at her and laughed and she felt like they’d seen each other for the first time in years. Napa Valley unfolded below them, a blanket of green vines planted in reassuring geometric rows, and farther out was the ocean, where they could see the clouds rolling in, but where they floated the sun was hot and the sky clear. Janice remembers thinking then that they’d made it through the worst years and now they were being lifted up, lifted like the balloon, and feeling pure joy. When had that feeling waned? Sometime after Lizzie was born, she thinks, once Paul was swept up in the technology boom, once Margaret had abandoned them for another life. Maybe it’s time to plan another trip to Napa, another balloon ride.

Janice checks her watch as Martha and Linda finish their game. It’s nine-thirty, and Beverly is a half hour late, which is so unlike her—Beverly, like Janice, is of the school that believes that promptness is a sign of respect—and when Janice finally calls her at home to see whether she forgot, no one answers. Perhaps there’s been an emergency with her son, Mark? Janice feels a vague sense of anxiety, a slight pull in the fabric of her morning. She waits fifteen more minutes, trying Beverly’s cell phone, too, and then gives up altogether. As she walks back up to the car she struggles to remember another time when Beverly failed to appear for a date and can’t recall a single incident.

The loss of her morning game throws Janice’s plans off and she arrives back in downtown Santa Rita half an hour before her hair appointment, annoyed at the upheaval of her meticulous schedule. To kill time, she picks up a box of truffles at the patisserie—cardamom and black pepper chocolates for him, violet and rose petal creams for her, and walnut-cinnamon for Lizzie—and a $150 bottle of Dom Pérignon that the gentleman at the wine cellar describes as “transcendent” (blatant hyperbole on his part, perhaps, but she is compelled nonetheless). She leaves both in the car, worried that they’ll melt and spoil, while she goes to have Peggy doctor her graying roots back to their original blond.