Best Intentions (29 page)

T
he air is sharp and bracingly clear, a premonition of winter without the cold murky sludge, deliciously false advertising for what is soon to come. I begin to walk slowly from my apartment building, filled with trepidation about going to Aperçu. The store was so much a part of Deirdre, a corner of her psyche and predilections made tangible.

I have gone only a block when I stop into the corner deli and grab an oversized chocolate chip cookie, justifying it as lunch. I eat the cookie as I walk, though it is disappointing, dry and cardboardy. I comfort myself with Deirdre's theory that if food doesn't taste good it has fewer calories. She had so many wacky convictions that I laughed at but adhered to nonetheless.

I am closing the cellophane wrapper around the last half of the cookie—even I'm not that desperate—when I hear someone calling my name, quietly at first and then more insistently.

I turn to see David hurriedly approaching. I reel, too shocked to organize a reaction, a plan. I want desperately to run and yet I don't.

I remain rooted until he is inches from me and then swivel purposefully away, unable to face him.

“Lisa, wait. Please,” he intones.

I stop, turn to him. “Are you following me?”

“No. Well, yes. I've been trying to reach you for days.”

I have not answered any of David's messages. I have been screening my calls to avoid him. I have sworn to Sam and to myself that I will never talk to him again. Beneath the very real anger, I have been wounded in ways that are not entirely comfortable to admit. Nevertheless, part of me has been waiting for this, despite everything, because of everything.

“I just want to talk,” he says, his breath curling white in the air between us and then dissipating.

David looks at me with an uncloaked hopefulness, his eyes boring into mine. He brushes his fingers nervously through his hair.

After all the diatribes that have been spooling relentlessly through my head, the words fly away. I don't know where to begin. There are so many entry points of betrayal, resentment. “Do you have any idea what you've done?” I demand irately. “Do you have any idea the damage you caused?”

“I've spoken to the police. I'm so sorry about your friend. I had no idea that you knew the woman in the photograph. Are you all right?” He reaches to touch me but I move instinctively away. He lets his arm drop.

“No, I'm not all right. You destroyed everything. You had no right to interfere in my life.”

“Lisa, I never meant to hurt you.”

“Just what did you think was going to happen?”

“Not this.”

“Why? Just tell me why you showed me those pictures.”

“I know this may be hard to understand, but I was trying to help you,” he says. “I went about it all wrong, I know that now, and I'm truly sorry. But I hated seeing you so confused, watching you cry that day in the restaurant. I overstepped, I get that. But I was trying to give you information that I thought you needed.” He glances sideways at a truck unloading boxes on the pavement, then turns back to me. “I was clueless about what my wife was up to and I suffered for it. In my world, information is power.”

“No matter who it wounds or how wrong it is?” I demand.

“No, of course not.”

A mother pushing a baby in a stroller covered with a plastic wind protector makes her way around us. I watch as she stops for the light, checking on her child before moving on.

I know deep down that I am the one who grabbed on to those pictures and used them as a lethal weapon, unwittingly perhaps, but disastrously nonetheless.

I shift my weight from one foot to the other, trying to summon the will to meet David's gaze, the fury I feel both lessened and magnified by his proximity. I cannot get my bearings.

“Sam told me about your history with him. You never cared about me at all. You just wanted to get back at him.” I am aware that I sound more scorned and bitter than I had intended, but it is too late.

David shakes his head. “You're wrong,” he insists. “I'll admit that I was a bit more curious about you when I found out who you were married to. But then we got to know each other. I did care about you. I still do care about you. Very much. I never intended to cause you this kind of pain.”

He leans forward with a sad earnestness that gives me pause, but I refuse to give in to him.

“Well, you did.”

“Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”

“No,” I reply harshly.

He begins to speak but I do not want to hear it.

“I have to go,” I tell him.

“Lisa, we're not done. Please. Let's just talk.”

“No. We are done. Don't do this again, don't call me. I mean it. Don't.”

He stands completely still, cocks his head, blinks. Our eyes meet for an instant before I turn to walk quickly and self-consciously away from him.

I do not know how long David stands there, I do not know if he is watching me. I resist the urge to turn around.

I race down the busy street, wending around people lined up at a
coffee cart for caffeine and stale sugary donuts. I stare at them as if it is a ritual I have never seen before.

I cannot give credence to David's contrition or his rationales. They change nothing, excuse nothing. Still, it would be nice to believe he did care about me, that when he reached to kiss me it was attraction and not calculation. Because even if I didn't cross that line, I thought about it.

I shake my head and keep walking.

It is just before noon when I get to the store and all thoughts of David are pushed aside.

Though I tried to prepare myself, imagining how it will feel without Deirdre, the first steps inside are more agonizing than I'd anticipated. The imprint of her touch and her taste, her vision, is everywhere. I can almost smell her perfume.

Two young women of indeterminate age and indeterminate but surely highly creative hyphenated jobs are rifling through a rack of navy dresses—Deirdre always grouped by color rather than style—while they talk about a new wine bar set to open in the East Village next week. They have both been to advance parties there, it has potential, but once the hoi polloi make their way in, it could go either way. They engage in a detailed cost-benefit analysis of whether it is better to appear on the first night in case it turns out to be something or if that would in some way brand them as not quite in the loop, at least not the inner-inner loop. I watch as each pulls out a dress, scrupulously studies it, puts it back, and moves on while they continue their finely honed social calculations.

“Lisa, thank God you're here.” Janine comes over to hug me and begins to cry. “I can't believe this, I just can't believe this,” she says over and over again. There is no reason this should make me impatient. I have no right to measure her grief and entitlement to mourn against my own and find it lacking, and yet the fashion-girl theatricality of it irritates me. Which then makes me irritated at myself for being so ungenerous. I hold her, pat her back, and gently let her go. The two girls at the dresses glance over with only the slightest curiosity and move on to a grouping of Pucci-inspired blouses.

“The police were here for hours yesterday,” Janine tells me. “They were asking all these questions. They took Deirdre's computer and papers, all these other things.”

“What kinds of questions were they asking?”

“Who her friends were, men, who she did business with, you know. If there was anyone who hung around the store a lot. If she was ever gone for unexplained reasons. If she seemed upset recently. I told them everything I could, but Deirdre didn't share much about her personal life with me.”

“I know.”

“People keep calling. What am I supposed to tell them? What am I supposed to do about deliveries?” She begins crying again, she only wants to do what is right, she only wants to help, but…

“We'll figure it out,” I reassure her.

For the first time in days, there is a clearly delineated path in front of me. I leave Janine up front and go to Deirdre's tiny office in the back. The blank spot on her desk where her computer had been is jarring but I take a deep breath and sit down, unsure where to begin. I pick up a file of unpaid bills but there is a hold on all of her bank accounts and they will have to wait. I turn to her bulletin board, touch the fabric swatches, wonder what she had intended for them. There are darkened rectangles on the cork where, I assume, the police removed scraps of paper, phone numbers. I go through the fashion magazines checkered with yellow Post-its, some with scribbled notes about the designers, stars drawn in red ink, question marks. I open her desk drawer, a cluttered mess of paper clips, nubs of pencils, slips of paper I cannot make out. I find the hand-drawn tulip that Claire gave her last Valentine's Day. I put it in my bag, careful not to bend it, it wrenches my heart. There are over-the-counter diet pills, the kind of pseudo-natural supplements that are advertised in the back of magazines, I didn't think Deirdre would fall for that, all those little harmless secrets we keep, exhumed along with the more prosaic detritus that goes to make up a day, a life.

I don't find anything related to Sam in the drawer. Not that I was
expecting anything, I knew there wouldn't be, but still, I am relieved.

Every now and then Janine sticks her head in, asking if I need anything. She is palpably comforted to have a grown-up in the house, though I am clueless about so much and spend long intervals staring off into space. I wish I had paid more attention when Deirdre talked to me about the specifics of what she did but no one really listens all that closely to the ins and outs of other people's jobs. There are so many things she said that I try to recall now, so many lines I try retrospectively to read between. Too often what you deem to be inconsequential about another person turns out to be just the opposite.

Digging into Deirdre's file cabinet, I'm surprised to discover that she was far more organized than she appeared. Like women who claim they never diet but secretly count every calorie, she preferred to make everything appear effortless, to keep the hard work hidden from view. I try to remember if I ever told her I admired her but I doubt it. It is not the kind of thing you say.

The night Deirdre signed the lease on the store she came over to our apartment with two bottles of Champagne and we finished both off while the girls watched the Audrey Hepburn movies she brought them and Sam drifted in and out of the room. We sat at the kitchen table while Deirdre laid out her plans with all the giddiness, pride and anticipation she usually dismissed with a self-deprecating shrug, she was so exuberant that night. It really wasn't all that many years ago.

My eyes fill with tears.

More than anything I miss her. I simply miss her.

I miss most of all the small moments that seem like little nothings but prove to be indelible. The time Deirdre and I went out to dinner at some cheesy Italian restaurant in the West Village; she leaned over for a breadstick and her hair caught fire in the candle, or was it mine? I can't recall, all I remember is the singed acrid smell and our laughter. Her sadness at her father's death that she had never really made peace with him and the last of his mistresses,
though they were together for nineteen years. The way she told me her womb ached.

This person, this friend, is being stolen from me bit by bit, lost to investigations and allegations as much as death. Mourning her seems a luxury I am not yet allowed.

I have heard nothing all day. It irks me that the police do not feel obligated to inform me of every twist and turn the way they would a family member, that we are all still under suspicion. There is, too, the question of the DNA, noxious and unavoidable as much as I try to put it out of my mind.

It is just before five. I promise Janine I will come in again tomorrow and get ready to leave. Before I do, I take advantage of my last few minutes alone and pick up the phone.

“Lisa, what can I do for you?” Detective Gibbs greets me.

“I was just wondering if you had any new leads.” The phrase feels clumsy, it is not something I have ever said before, but my need to know takes precedence over any self-consciousness.

“Sometimes the most important thing you can do is eliminate false leads.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jack Handel's DNA was not a match. And his wife confirmed that he was home in Boston at eleven p.m. Monday night.” Gibbs pauses. “Lisa, we are going to have to talk further to your husband.”

T
his is what you do: You pretend that things are normal. Long past the point of rationality, you keep on pretending. It is the only way to keep moving, to get through the day with any shred of sanity. You pretend there is not a black hole in the center of your existence. But you know all the while there will come a time when that is no longer possible.

The following morning I rise early and make the girls pancakes for breakfast. I watch Sam tease them at the table, gently ribbing them over supposed crushes and imaginary academic infractions, I see his tenderness. The rhythm of our family life goes on, as it should, as it must, unseen by others and yet more real to me than anything that takes place outside these four walls. I still believe this is the truest version of ourselves, of Sam. I must believe that.

The alternative is unthinkable.

It is teacher development day, one of the myriad holes in the Weston calendar, most of which are unnecessary if not indulgent, as far as I'm concerned, and the girls have no school. After Sam leaves for work, I let them watch DVDs while I shower and then lie down on my bed, fully dressed and made-up, staring at the ceiling. All I see before me are empty hours ahead, a shapeless day waiting for anything that might bring definition to this no-man's-land of grief and regret and bewilderment.

I am past paying attention to anything else. If Phoebe is eating ice cream by ten a.m. and Claire is trying to conquer the use of eye-liner despite my ban on makeup, so be it. None of it seems to matter.

A couple of hours later, I drop Claire off at Lily's, where they will put on outlandish outfits and then videotape themselves in endless scenarios that for some reason usually entail one of them ending up in a shrieking death grip. Phoebe has a birthday party at Mud Bath, one of a chain of do-it-yourself pottery stores that cater to restless rainy-day children and parents desperate for any craft activity that they do not personally have to engage in. In a brilliant bit of marketing, the store offers jug wine in the back so that parents can get quietly and happily sloshed while their kids make twenty-dollar mugs in the shape of cows and dogs. All across Manhattan, there are children drinking hot chocolate out of pink speckled pig heads, the ears long since broken off and lying on windowsills waiting forlornly to be glued back on.

When we walk in, the party is just getting started, the children's smocks already covered in ashy bits of clay. Phoebe takes her place at the end of a long rectangular table festooned with balloons and begins to work silently on a mug while the other girls chatter around her. I have always thought of Phoebe as a happy, self-sufficient girl and seeing her shrink this way among her classmates pulls at my heart. I stand a few feet away, surreptitiously watching, the interior life that I once found transparent abstruse to me now. It is impossible to know with children if a sudden change in demeanor is a temporary reaction, situational, or if it is the first glimpse of a seismic and possibly permanent shift, if this will be the new normal. She catches me looking at her and frowns with displeasure.

I admit my guilt with a helpless shrug, and turn to leave. Just before I get to the door, I run into Tara and her daughter, Isabel, on their way in. Isabel scampers off to the table without so much as a good-bye while Tara, barely noticing, turns to me.

“I heard about your dust-up with Georgia,” she remarks coolly.

“Oh God,” I groan. “I'm sure it's all over the school.”

“Like a bad case of lice,” Tara admits.

“I was having a crummy day. I never should have lost it that way.”

“I've always thought if Georgia would just break down and eat something she'd be a lot less cranky. You shouldn't let her drive you off the benefit committee.”

“I think she already has.”

“If I were you I'd go to the next meeting just to see the look on her face.”

I smile doubtfully. “Maybe.”

We glance over at our children, reaching for jars of glaze, jostling one another as they try to hoard the best colors. Later they will each be given a paper ticket to pick up their creations after they have been fired a couple of days from now.

“I never remember to come back for these things,” Tara admits. “Do you think there's a landfill somewhere out in Queens with thousands of abandoned pig and cow mugs?”

“If you want I can pick up Isabel's mug when I get Phoebe's,” I offer a bit shyly. We are both aware that it is an overture.

“Are you sure?”

“It's no problem. I'll send it into school with Phoebe.” The truth is, I have never forgotten to pick up one of these damn mugs in my life. That kind of nonchalance is totally beyond me. I envy it as much as I secretly reproach it.

“That would be great.” She looks around, drained of conversation. “Well, I'm sure you have to get back to work,” she says hopefully.

“Yes, I ran over here on my lunch hour.”

We say good-bye and I walk out as if I have someplace to go.

I didn't intend to lie, certainly not working isn't exactly a mark of shame with this bunch, but I do not have the energy to deal with explanations.

Though I don't miss my job, at least not the perilous minefield it had become, I have no structure to take its place, no distraction from worries and obsessions. I am left with just myself. I don't
know what word on the street is about my departure from Merdale, if they are spreading lies to cover themselves or if they are pretending I simply never existed. I will find out soon enough when I look for another job. Just the thought of it, of sitting through interviews and pretending I want it, really want it, leaves me depressed and exhausted. But I can see no other option. Even with unemployment insurance I can't go long without working. I am almost forty. I will never be the next new thing, that is over for me. And I cannot afford to try new careers on for size, not at this point. Looking ahead at years, decades of work that no longer engages me but is necessary nonetheless is too discouraging to contemplate right now.

When I get to Aperçu, Janine is ringing up a woman at the register, carefully folding her multitude of purchases, two jersey wrap dresses, a short swingy tweed jacket, a silk blouse or tunic or minidress, the length is indeterminate, a scarf, between sheets of crisp pale-blue tissue paper. I try to calculate what the woman has spent, marveling that anyone has that kind of cash to blow on clothes. She walks out slinging the glossy shopping bag over her shoulder.

“She'll return half of it tomorrow,” Janine remarks. “She always does. She once accused us of having a mirror that makes her look ten pounds thinner than the one she has at home.”

She leans over, kisses me on both cheeks. For a short period of time, a third kiss appeared in certain circles but luckily it faded into the graveyard of other failed trends. Janine appears to contemplate giving it a comeback but thinks better of it.

“I tried to compile the list of designers that you asked for,” she says. “I'm not sure if it's all of them, but it's close. I left it on Deirdre's desk.”

“Thanks. I'll go have a look at it.”

It feels a little less strange this time to walk into the office, hang up my coat.

I glance quickly at the designers list but it means little to me. I have never heard of ninety percent of them. There was so much Deirdre and I didn't have in common. It was one of the things we
laughed about, finding our vastly different styles and fields of knowledge amusing, if at times baffling.

Within an hour I realize there is very little I can do here. When Janine comes in to drop off the day's mail, I pretend to be busy but I don't think she falls for it. I thank her and begin to rifle through the catalogues and bills. Already, there are invitations to Christmas parties from designers, some with personal notes to Deirdre written across the bottom: Hope to see you, Looking forward to catching up, It's been too long. They knock my breath away. I stare at them, queasy, until I can barely see straight.

I am almost at the bottom of the stack when I come across a nine-by twelve-inch manila envelope with Deirdre's name written in black Sharpie. There is something in the intimate scrawl that makes me hesitate. There is no return address. I turn it over and run my fingernail beneath the adhesive flap.

Inside there is a black-and-white photograph of Deirdre, the one I saw last week in Ben's studio, Deirdre wearing just a shirt, staring out of the window. There is no note, just the inky signature at the bottom, “xob.” I put it down and look at the postmark on the envelope. Ben must have put it in the mail the afternoon he left for India.

My hands shake slightly as I hold the picture close and feel an ache in every organ. I trace Deirdre's outlines with my fingertips, the pensive look, satisfied or sad or both, it is hard to discern, the smudge of mascara beneath her right eye, the way she is hugging her knees, her hair spilling over her shoulders, the beauty mark she hated on her collarbone, these are the things you miss most, these are the specifics of loss and longing.

I shut my eyes, but a spectral replica of the image is imprinted behind my lids.

It seeps in slowly, a question, a realization.

I pick up the picture once more. The shirt Deirdre is wearing, with its variegated stripes and loose folds, is the one she bought at the sample sale that she invited me to after she told me that she and Ben had broken up.

No matter what she said, no matter what she told Jack, they never really had stopped seeing each other at all. I sit in Deirdre's office with my coat on, staring at the photograph, while the light outside grows dark.

Ben has not returned any of my messages. Whatever Deirdre was to him, or he to her, whatever the photograph says about the forensics of desire, it seems impossible to me that he doesn't know she is gone, that he is walking around, working, going about his life, assuming she is doing the same.

Despite all my misgivings about Ben, I cannot deny their bond any more than I can understand it. It is there, sitting before me on the desk in black and white.

I pick up the phone and call the photo department at
Vogue
. After telling at least a dozen interns, assistants and junior editors that I am a family member of Ben Erickson's and there has been an emergency, I finally reach the photo director, who is singularly unmoved by the words
family
or
emergency
. “If you've left messages for him I really don't see what else I can do,” she informs me snootily.

“Can you at least tell me when he is due to return?” I ask, frustrated.

“All right,” she sighs, as if this is a herculean task. “I'll check the call sheet. He was going to do a pretty quick turnaround. I'm pretty sure he flew in this morning.”

I listen to her rustle around.

“Huh. Looks like he called in and said he needed the day. He'll be back later tonight. That's twice in one trip he changed his ticket. First class to India. Do you have any idea what that costs?”

“He changed his flight out, too?”

“Seems he missed it. He got a later one that night. I wish these photographers would realize that the anything-goes days of the past are over.”

“You're sure he missed his flight Monday night?”

“Yes,” she replies impatiently. “That's what I said, isn't it?”

I thank her and hang up while she is still railing about the slump in advertising and draconian budget cuts.

I stare down at the photo before me.

Ben, with his bruising fingerprints, his fickle heart and his questionable moral compass and the sex that Deirdre told me hovered on the edge but never crossed over.

What if, just once, it did?

I pick up the phone and call Detective Gibbs. “There's someone you need to talk to,” I tell her.