We Could Be Beautiful (35 page)

“You’re eating for two now,” William said. “Good girl.”

The waitress with the penciled-on eyebrows scanned me for signs of pregnancy with a dulled interest and stuck her pen back in her bun.

“Is this restaurant okay?” William asked. I knew that if I weren’t pregnant, he wouldn’t have asked me that. I loved that he was babying me. I felt special. I also deserved it. If anything terrible had happened to me in the past, then I was a victim and the world owed me now. This was how karma worked.

“Yeah,” I said, in a way that was purposely unconvincing, “it’s fine.”

William chose a sesame roll out of the basket. “Can I butter a piece of bread for you?”

“Yes, please. I want rye though.”

“Okay.” He poked through the choices. “Good, here is a piece of rye.” He took time to spread the butter into every corner. “There you are, my darling.”

“Thank you.”

“So what are we going to do about rearranging the house for the baby? Where should the baby’s room be?”

“In the study, I think.”

“The music room?”

“Yeah. You guys can practice in your office, right?”

“Sure, of course. Why not?” He bit into his roll.

I put my bread down. The fennel was not agreeing with me. “I don’t like the rye. Can you butter me a different one, please?”

“Of course. How about a multigrain option?”

“Sure.”

“You know”—he knifed the whipped butter out of the ramekin—“on the subject of offices, I’d like to say again that I feel autonomy in one’s home is paramount. I don’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable, my darling, but I must ask you once more not to go through my things.”

I tried to keep my face expressionless. I clutched my stomach. How had he known? I’d been so careful. “I didn’t,” I said, and maintained eye contact because that was what you were supposed to do when you delivered a good lie.

“Catherine,” he said, sighing.

“What?”

“Lucia told me.”

“Lucia told you what?”

“That you went through my desk recently, again, after I nicely asked you not to do so.”

“Why would Lucia tell you that?”

“She mentioned it in passing.” He tucked his napkin into his shirt. “We mustn’t lie to one another, Catherine.”

“Is this why you gave Lucia that bonus? To keep tabs on me?”

“I gave Lucia a bonus because she rightly deserved one. I feel we should treat our people well, don’t you?”

“We do treat her well. Did you know she has health insurance?”

“No, I didn’t. That is very generous.”

We looked at each other for a long time. When I closed my eyes, I could still see his face. The diner smelled like chicken-fried steak all of a sudden.

“I don’t feel well.” To someone else I would have said, “I don’t feel good.” It pissed me off that I was still speaking in a way that would impress him.

“Perhaps you’d like some seltzer.” He looked around for the waitress. “I’m sorry you don’t feel well,” he said. “But I must know, why are you looking through my things? What is it you want to know?”

“I don’t know.”

“It must be something. If it is, please ask me. I’m right here.”

“I guess I just feel like you’re mysterious sometimes.”

“Am I?” He laughed. “How?”

“I don’t know. You never talk about your past.”

“We’ve been over this, Catherine. I like to think I live in the present moment.”

“But people have pasts. It’s normal to talk about them. Like your friends in Geneva. You never talk about those people. And the people from your past who still live in New York. Why don’t you talk about them?”

“People in New York? Everyone I knew here when I was a child is either dead or gone.”

“Okay, I know, and that’s very sad. But I mean just in general. You never talk about the past.”

“Certainly,” he said, “I simply choose not to much of the time.” He leaned in. “Because I am here. With you. That is what I care about.”

The more I tried to breathe deeply, the more I was aware of how shallow my breath was.

“Did you ever visit us after you moved to Switzerland?”

“I would assume so.”

“You said no to that before.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it must have been an error on my part. I apologize.”

“Did you ever meet me when I was a kid?”

“If I did, I don’t remember it.”

“But there’s a chance you did?”

“There’s a chance for everything. What are you driving at?”

“I just need to know if we met before, when we were kids.”

“Not that I can recall, Catherine.”

“Do you remember someone who worked for us named Mae?”

“Mae.” He took a bite of his roll, chewed slowly. “I don’t think so. Why?”

I looked at his face, trying to find wrinkles I hadn’t seen before. I had done this so many times since Mae had told me the guy had been smoking a cigarette. No, there were no wrinkles I hadn’t seen. There were barely any wrinkles at all.

“Did you look me up when you got back here?”

“This again? No, Catherine,” he said. “I did not look you up on the Internet.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“So it was a coincidence we met.”

“Catherine,” he said, “it was fate. Don’t you believe that?”

I didn’t answer. I took my phone out of my purse, scrolled to the picture of the picture of me and Mae and the guy in the background. I told my hands to stop shaking. I pointed to the guy. “Is this you?”

I didn’t take my eyes off him. He blinked a few times. Did this mean something? Did it not?

“When was this picture taken?”

“Nineteen seventy-seven.”

“So I would have been sixteen or seventeen then, and this young man appears to be around that age, possibly. It’s hard to tell.” He was still looking at the screen. “And these pants. I highly doubt I would have worn pants like these to a party at night. They are too light a color. I would have worn black pants.” He looked at me then. His solid, cool face. His eyes, big and asking. They were asking me to believe him. “Have you asked your mother if this is me?”

“She can’t remember.”

“Oh,” he said. He looked sorry for me. “Well, if it is me, is that a problem?”

“If it’s you, then we’ve met before.”

“A long time ago. And we don’t remember it. I would hardly call that meeting.”

“So you don’t know whether it’s you or not. That’s your answer? You don’t know?”

William chuckled. “Catherine, if it is me, I have no recollection of it. That’s the thing about the past, you know. You don’t remember everything.” He carefully set the phone in front of me. I remember just then the screen went black. “And the things we do remember we cannot always trust. We cannot trust our minds. We cannot trust our memories.”

•

He didn’t leave my side for the rest of the day. Maybe he thought that if he was right there, opening the door for me and telling me how lovely I was and saying cutesy things about my toes as we lay on the couch watching an Almodóvar film, I would be more likely to remember how wonderful he was, or at least I would get tired of punishing him. And that’s exactly what happened. The hours wore me down. As the day fell away into dusk and then into darkness, and he dotingly fed me pretzels and seltzer and even banished Herman from the room after I said his canine smell was really getting to me, I began to wonder if William was right. Did the past not matter? Was there anything beyond this moment and this room and our warm bodies inside it? And if that were true—if we had everything we needed right here—then what was I still looking for?

37

W
e woke up together in the guest room—William, in a move that both satisfied and annoyed me, had come to the conclusion that I was more important to him than the Tempur-Pedic—and went to church. It was a hot day, unbearably hot. You could have fried an egg on the ground. Even the people at church looked dressed for the beach. Well, either the beach or an upscale barbecue event. Marge was sadly absent.

Father Ness said, “It’s almost your turn up there!” He looked especially hunched today. The weight of his backpack must have been wearing on him.

An old woman with a zebra pin on her lapel said, “Don’t you two just make the cutest couple?” We smiled and held each other’s clammy hands, posing for a picture no one was taking.

I sat there fanning myself with a Bible study flyer. I made my list of prayers to God like he was Santa Claus.

God, please let Mae Simon be a lunatic and a liar. Please let this child be born healthy. Please let William and me have a fantastic wedding, and please let us get the money. I just want us to be normal and okay.

William, the church soldier, sang in monotone and beat his chest at the part about sinning, and kneeled with his hands pressed together in front of his solemn, concentrated face. I wondered what he was praying for.

•

That afternoon I decided to be a caring fiancée and bring Stan and William sodas. I was trying to keep everything as normal and okay as possible. I imagined myself opening the door and cooing something like, “Just thought you boys might like a little pick-me-up.” I even found straws with red stripes on them in the pantry.

I knocked on the door twice and then opened it. Stan was playing vigorously, face warped in concentration—and William was behind him at the desk, checking his phone. He was startled when he saw me; his body jolted. He stood up and went to Stan and said, “That’s very good, though the C chord needs work.”

Stan looked up at him. “Huh?”

The sodas were making my hands cold, so I went to put them on the desk, and I said, “Just thought you guys might like a refresher,” which was the wrong word. “Refreshment,” I corrected.

“Thanks, Mrs. West!” But before he got up, Stan asked William, “Can I have a soda?”

“Sure.” William clapped him on the back. “Thank you, darling,” he said to me. He kissed my forehead. “Though in the future, it would be better not to interrupt in the middle of a session. But we do love soda, don’t we, Stan?”

“Mmm-hmm.” Stan sipped from the straw.

In a too-cheery voice, I said, “Well, I’ll leave you to it then!” I closed the door and stood there and listened.

I heard Stan say, “Mrs. West is really nice.”

“Yes,” William said.

“Is she your soul mate? Because that’s who gets married. It’s soul mates. I read about it in my book.”

William laughed—just one little ha, just a beat—and said, “Sure, Stan, that’s exactly what she is. My soul mate.”

•

Max played while Dan massaged me and everything seemed normal and okay. Max seemed to be playing better than usual today. There was no yelling. I hoped William was paying attention to Max and not on his phone.

Dan and I didn’t talk much because I said, “I don’t feel like talking today.” I didn’t want to remember the reasons I had cried at the park. He said that was fine and did his job. He also said that when I got more pregnant, we could think about buying me a massage chair because eventually it would be too much to lie on my stomach. I thought it was a great idea and spent a good part of the hour imagining what kind of chair I would buy and where it would go and how it would change the feel of the room.

•

After my massage I called for him. “William?”

“Yes, darling? We’re up here,” he said.

I expected to find him and Max watching TV. Doreen must be running late again. But when I got to the top of the stairs, there was no Max. There was Caroline weeping and William holding her, patting her back, saying, “Ssshh.”

“Caroline?”

Her face was bloated and streaked with tears and she was wearing the Nantucket sweatshirt again, or still. Maybe she’d never taken it off. She stood up and wrapped her arms around me. I held my breath and waited for her to squeeze the life out of me, but that didn’t happen today. Her arms were limp.

“Bob’s in Miamiiiiiiii,” she wailed.

William put his hand on Caroline’s back. We exchanged a look. It said, This is very sad. I hoped it also said, This will never be us; we will never do this to each other.

“Caroline, I’m so sorry.” And she kept crying, so I said it again. “I’m so sorry.”

Dan appeared at the top of the stairs. “Oh,” he said.

“Caroline, would you like a massage? You can take my place,” William said.

Caroline wiped her tear-streaked face, looked at Dan. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Dan said, hands clasped in front of him. He looked like a waiter: attentive, ready to take the order.

“I don’t want a massage right now,” Caroline squeaked.

“Okay, that’s fine,” William said, rubbing her shoulder now. “You don’t have to get one.”

And then she was crying again, with her face pressed into William’s arm, and he said, “Why don’t we sit down? Maybe Catherine can bring us some tea. Or a coffee? Would you like that?”

Caroline, like a toddler, said, “I want juice.”

“Well,” I said to Dan, “I guess you’re free earlier than you thought.”

“That’s fine,” Dan said.

“Here, let me pay you.” I wrote a check at the counter. I paid him for two massages and left a huge tip, even bigger than usual—my apology for throwing him into this awkward family scene.

“Thank you, Catherine,” he said. Before he left, he gave me a look. It said: You are going to be okay. I don’t know what my expression said back to him. Probably: I am flustered.

The closest thing I had to juice was a watermelon-flavored wine spritzer. “This is even better than juice,” Caroline said, and laughed at herself.

William, who was drinking one, too—to be supportive, I thought, because wine spritzers were definitely beneath him—agreed. “It is quite good,” he said, and winked at Caroline.

I sat there in my robe across from them, feeling cold. Where were my slippers? I wanted to go find them but thought I should stay and be supportive. I also stayed because I was intrigued. How William took care of Caroline, that’s how he took care of me. He was good at it. He was a good shoulder to cry on—so sturdy, so consoling. I couldn’t leave him. How could I leave him? I couldn’t leave him. He was such a solid guy.

When Caroline went to the bathroom—in slow motion, sadly dragging her feet—I asked, “How was Max today?”