Happy Any Day Now (2 page)

A
year later, one week short of the anniversary of my aneurysm and a brilliant Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon saving my life, I made the stupid decision to risk it.

Blame it on spring fever. Or on the cherry blossom trees that were currently turning the dowdiest parts of Baltimore into a pink blaze of glory. The flowers bloomed for a few days of gorgeousness and then faded away. But oh, how they lived when they lived. Maybe they weren’t the best inspiration for making a dangerous decision.

I checked my watch. Ten of two. For the umpteenth time, I skimmed the page ripped from the
Goucher College Quarterly
that had been slipped under my door by my best friend and neighbor, my favorite lesbian yenta Marti McDowell. The article was titled “Justice Pruitt to Discuss American Elective Process.” Far left, where God knows he’d never have placed himself in real life, was a recent photo of Charlie Pruitt, man of my dreams, man of my sleepless nights.

I’d met Charles Evans Pruitt when I was at the New England Conservatory of Music and he was a student at Harvard Law School. A scholarship kid from Brooklyn and a Brahmin from Manhattan were an unlikely pair, but we were madly in love—okay, I thought it was we; maybe it was only me—for more than two years. Then he told his family about his half-Jewish, half-Korean girlfriend, Judith Soo Jin Raphael, and
boom!
It was over.

Except not for me, not for a very long time. Keeping a vow to my therapist, I’d forced myself to stop Googling him years ago. Now I stared at his image, searching for landmarks of the Charlie I’d known and loved.

Decked out in his robe, he looked somber and weighty, both judicially and figuratively. He had to have gained twenty pounds since the last time I’d seen him, thin and drawn at our horrible breakup. But the eyes were the same, a brilliant magnetic blue. And his hair was polished silver. He looked like a more distinguished version of the young, irresistible Charlie: smart, pedigreed, and for a second—as the old sad song played in my brain for the first time in decades—totally out of my league.

A paragraph was devoted to his credentials, dazzling of course: Harvard Law, with honors. Name partner in Pruitt, Bryce and Summerville, LLP, a prestigious Park Avenue law firm, until his appointment thirteen years earlier as a justice on New York State’s highest court, Manhattan branch. And the public was invited to a free lecture at Goucher, Sunday afternoon, two p.m., where he’d be addressing the topic “Pros and Cons of the Electoral College.” Riveting. There was nothing about his personal life in the article, but Marti had scrawled in the margins, “I Googled. He’s divorced.”

I shouldn’t have cared. Charlie was no longer a part of my life, which was infinitely better for that. I was perfectly happy with Geoff. Well, not perfectly, but close. I shouldn’t have come to Goucher. But, of course, in a classic case of heart over head so you land on your ass, here I was approaching the entrance to Kelley Hall, fingers trembling as I jammed the article back into my handbag. Then I heard a jumble of loud young voices and turned to check out what the excitement was all about. That’s when I saw him.

Not his face. In the crush of students who made a walking barrier, protecting him as if he were the Dalai Lama, all that was visible was Charlie’s back. But I’d have known the slope of it anywhere. And underneath the Hickey Freeman suit, I could connect the spatter of freckles below his right shoulder blade into a map of Venezuela. For a second, I was aware of my inability to swallow. Then, amid a flash of silver hair, an angle of jaw, I found spit and he vanished into the lecture hall. His audience drifted in. I waited until the coast was clear, then walked slowly up the steps, as if it were the last mile. On the landing, I halted. This outing was absurd. Charlie might not even remember how special we were, given how time erases life and life erases time.

Then again, he might have bookmarked those excruciating last moments when I’d deliberately dumped his law texts on the floor—the vilest insult I could think of—and mocked his family as a cadre of fascist snobs. Why did I even want to meet him again, this traitor who had snubbed me because my ex so-called father sold lox and my war bride mother had a checkered past? I was starting up so I could stop? Talk about circular reasoning. Talk about bullshit. Turn around and go, for God’s sake!

And I would have. But I caught a snatch of conversation from inside Kelley Hall. The words were muffled through the closed door, but when you’ve heard someone tell you he loves you, he adores you, you’re the best thing that ever happened to him, sorry but good-bye, you remember that voice forever.

So fine, I’d see him. Now or never. I’d gripped the door handle, ready to push, when a student, some kid in an Orioles baseball cap and a camouflage backpack, came up behind me. “May I help you with that, ma’am?” Polite enough to charm an old lady, which he obviously thought I was.
Oy!
and its Korean equivalent,
Aigoo!
I almost turned on my heel then, but the kid was holding the door, waiting. I took a deep breath and barreled through. Charlie was already striding to the lectern, his back to me. My intent was to slip into a seat in the last row, but it was packed, so I wound up in the only empty seat, second row, dead center. It took me a while, concentrating on my hands, which I’d folded into the prayer pose to control their tremor, before I felt I could look up. When I did, my glance met Charlie’s and locked. Brown eyes to blue, we held that stare for maybe five seconds. Then I blinked. First, dammit. But he managed to knock into his stack of notes and send them flying. So I called it a draw.

• • •

Charlie had always been an accomplished public speaker. He was quick on his feet and, more important, he had nerves of steel and the confidence of a man born to an established trust fund.

That afternoon at Goucher, once I heard all I ever needed to know about the electoral college, I tuned out and treated myself to nearly an hour of just watching him, with that voice, its timbre as mellow as a Guarneri cello’s, playing soothingly in the background.

Maybe I wasn’t objective—we had a complicated history—but to me Charles Evans Pruitt was still handsome, even with the extra weight, which in his well-cut suit seemed less blimpy than under the robe in the photo. His hair was now parted left, instead of right—more a barber’s decision than a political statement, I figured. Beyond the hair issues, the Cotton Mather sharpness of his features—I used to think I could slice Aunt Phyllis’s challah with the knife-edge of his nose—had softened with more padding; the angle of his jaw had become less Superman. These I counted as improvements. Yes, there were the wrinkles around the eyes and the chin sag, but no major facial erosion. And when he paced up front with a bounce in his gait, I could see hardly any paunch beyond the unbuttoned suit jacket. Charlie was fifty-four and I’d bet he was still a runner.
Aigoo
, was he a runner.

After he’d nimbly dispatched with the Q and A, it was over. By the time I stood to work my way toward the aisle, a crush of admiring students had surrounded him. There was no way I was going to take a ticket to talk to a man I had once screwed. I didn’t have to. Charlie called out, “Judith!” I waved. Nothing fancy. And then I heard him excuse himself. Next moment, he was leaning over the first-row seats to clasp both my hands in both of his. Thus linked, I made my way to the aisle.

His eyes were sparkling. “My God, it
is
you.” As if there were hordes of big-bosomed women with almond-shaped eyes and gold cello charms hung from their necks to choose from. “What are you doing here?”

“I figured it was my chance to learn the intricacies of the electoral college. Just in case I ever decide to enroll.”

He chuckled. “Well, for whatever reason, I’m delighted you’re here. Good God, Judith, it’s been how long? Twenty-five years?”

“Soon to be twenty-six.”

“Let me take a look at you.” We were still hands-in-hands and now he pulled out for a body-riding appraisal.
Thank you, Nordstrom’s, for the miraculous tummy-tuck jeans
. “Still beautiful. It’s amazing. You really haven’t changed.”

“I have actually, but now’s not the time to go into detail.” The restless buzz from the students gathered at the lectern was spiraling.

“Right. We must catch up, though.” His forehead wrinkled. “Damn, I wish I were free tonight, but Manhattan calls. I’ve got a meeting I can’t miss. My car should be here”—he checked his watch—“about now.”

Before he gave me back my hands, he ran his thumb over the ring finger of my left one. Typical Charlie move. According to Emily Post or his mommy dearest, Kiki Pruitt, or whoever had taught Charlie the minutiae of etiquette, it would have been crass to cop a glimpse of my finger, so he’d found a discreet way to establish that the old girlfriend wasn’t wearing a wedding band.

“You’re in the phone book?”

“Well, no actually.” I managed to get that out just as a large woman with a Goucher name tag touched his shoulder.

“I hate to interrupt, Your Honor, but your fans are waiting.”

“I play with the Maryland Philharmonic,” I said.

“I’ll find you,” His Honor answered. “May I call you?”

Now that got me—the request for permission that was pure Pruitt. I was doing just fine until that exquisitely polite expression of noblesse oblige from the haves to the haves-less. A ridiculous notion of power,
my
notion yanked from my insecure old times in Boston. He was just being his natural charming self. I nodded, feeling a lump bob in my throat.

“We’ll talk” were his last words before he was led away. Correction: “Judith,” with a smile and an incredulous shake of his head, was his actual last word.

• • •

Back at my car, I had second, third and fourth thoughts. Did I really need this foray into the past? If Charlie said he’d call, he’d call. And where would that lead? Nowhere was the best option. Somewhere was the worst. Final destination for both: dead end.

As I gazed morosely at a cherry tree that had just begun to shed, a Lincoln Town Car drove up and parked. Charlie’s ride. To ferry him to the airport or Penn Station or all the way to New York and his Park Avenue apartment, transmogrified in my mind to a penthouse with a John Singer Sargent portrait of Great-Great-Grandmama Pruitt over the sofa and a butler on call in the pantry.

So there it was. All laid out for me in living color. Charlie and I moved in different worlds that would only collide if we tried to nudge them closer.

What had I been thinking?

O
n Monday morning, my only guaranteed day off in the week, I was in my neurologist’s office for the first of my post-aneurysm yearly checkups.

I was fine. Dr. Creswell, God bless him, got that out of the way fast.

“We had a look at the 3-D angiogram of your brain and the radiologist and I concur: Everything looks just the way it should in there. No surprises. Coils are sitting pretty.” He showed me the computer image of the platinum coils and the stent sealing off the vascular bubble that could have killed me. “Nothing remarkable like baby aneurysms hiding out. You should be good as new.”

After exhaling the breath I’d been holding since waking up that morning, I grumbled—just for effect—“Some new. I’m going to be fifty in a few months.” He and I were both aware there had been a time when we weren’t sure I’d make it through the surgery, let alone to this milestone.

“Fifty, huh?” He checked the chart. “Could have fooled me. Well, there’s no reason to believe you don’t have another fifty ahead of you.”

I thought of Lulu Cho and said, “I’d like that in writing, please.”

He laughed. “And I’d like to give it to you. But what I’ve learned in my thirty years of practice is there’s no such thing as a sure thing in medicine. No guarantees. I’m a doctor, not a fortune-teller.”

Under the circumstances, ouch.

“What I
can
say is that everything looks good at the moment. I wish I could tell that to all my patients. This was a positive report, Judith. Go out and celebrate, and I’ll see you next year.”

• • •

When I called Marti to tell her that Creswell had given me an all clear, she whooped and said, “Fantastic news. Couldn’t be happier for you and your empty head. And perfect timing—we can follow doctor’s orders and celebrate at Tio Pepe’s.”

Marti patched together a respectable income from a number of part-time jobs—contributing editor at
Toque Blanche
magazine, food columnist for
The Gourmet Travel Digest
, head honcho at the blog Hot and Juicy, and her favorite: restaurant critic for the Baltimore
Herald
newspaper.

“Tio’s is long overdue for a review,” she said. “You can have your gastronomic orgasm. The sole with bananas.” It was the restaurant’s signature dish, decadently rich and my downfall.

I loved Tio’s, but it was a low-ceilinged whitewashed grotto with the worst acoustics in town, which meant that everyone shouted and everyone heard what everyone was shouting. The regulars tended to know one another and table-hop nonstop, so it was like a bar mitzvah, only with shrimp. The place was jammed when I arrived. I waved to a Maryland Phil flutist as I made my way to our table. Marti was dressed in her restaurant reviewer’s mufti, a large shadow-casting black straw hat and sunglasses that fooled no one, including the staff. Grinning, she gave me a thumbs-up, which might have triggered what happened next. As I slipped into the seat across from her and the waiter handed me my menu, I felt swamped by a wave of unadulterated joy—the first in a long time—which I attributed to having been given the green light on life that morning.
Probably
given. My grandma Roz would have been muttering kinehoras from the grave. But my live mother, quoting Buddha, overrode Raphael ghosts knocking on the wood of their own coffins: “Not dream of past, not dwell in future, live in present. This is true happiness, Judith.”

“Earth to Judith, hell-
o
? You all right, kiddo?” Marti was tapping her spoon to her water glass for attention.

“Huh? Fine. I didn’t realize it until I smelled the garlic, but I’m starved.”

“Yeah, taking a pass on death will do that for you.”

We ordered half the menu to sample.

“Save enough room for dessert. Gotta have dessert. Which reminds me . . .” Marti flung down her napkin. “Be right back.”

When she returned wearing a cryptic smirk, we settled down to the serious business of journalistic eating, passing tastes and opinions to each other while Marti took notes under the drape of the tablecloth.

Nearly an hour and eight dishes later, as the busboy began to clear the table, she said, “Bueno. Three stars. Some things never change, thank God. Okay, now that your tummy’s full and your mood is mellow, tell me how it went with you and The Barrister. Did he ravish you on the steps of Haebler Chapel?”

“How did you—?” The woman confounded me.

“Oh, puh-
leeze
,” she cut me off. “As if you could have stayed away. He’s like cream to your cat. Talk.”

“Not much to talk about. We had maybe two minutes with students milling around. He’s still charming. Attractive.”

“Uh-oh.”

“He was happy to see me. Stunned, but in a good way.”

“And you?”

I shrugged. “It was a dumb move, stirring up all that old Charlie shit. I probably should have left well enough alone.”

Marti scowled. “I’ve always hated that phrase. ‘Well enough alone.’ If all of us left well enough alone, life would be incredibly boring. But maybe in this case . . .”

I stared into my wineglass.

“Stop second-guessing yourself, Judith. If you hadn’t wanted to see him, you wouldn’t have gone to the lecture. Don’t evil eye me. A woman’s heart knows a woman’s heart. Maybe you and I don’t march to the same drummer sexually, but the heart is not the pussy. Speaking of which, I’ll bet you didn’t sleep with Geoff this weekend.”

“I couldn’t have been less in the mood. I had my period.” For the first time in months, after I thought it had vanished forever.

“Well, aren’t you Britney Spears. You do know Geoff’s going to be heartbroken if you run off with The Barrister.”

I played with my knife. “If you’re so concerned about Geoff, why did you bait me with the article about Charlie? I don’t get it. I thought you liked Geoff.”

“Me? Hell, I love Geoff. If you loved Geoff, I never would have brought it up. But you don’t seem to take him seriously and—”

“It’s Geoff who doesn’t take
me
seriously,” I interrupted.

“—appreciate him. Maybe there’s unresolved Charlie stuff in the way. So I figure you stop by, say hello, see what he looks like with a fat ass from sitting on the bench for thirteen years, get a whiff of the
Hah-vad
accent that can’t possibly impress you anymore, say ‘Nice meeting you again and thanks for most of the memories’ and be done with him forever. Finally flush him out of your system so there’s room for Geoff. But it didn’t work that way, did it?”

I slugged the last of the white sangria. “Charlie wants to get together. To catch up.” Marti gave off a low hum. “Please don’t read more into it than old friends having a reunion.”

“Oh, definitely and positively. And you won’t go, of course. When is this so-called, never-to-be-realized reunion taking place?”

“He said he’d call.”

“Nothing worse than waiting for a call from a once and/or future lover. Don’t you dare let me catch you mooning by the phone like some teenager.”

“Not to worry. I haven’t been a teenager since . . . Come to think of it, I was never a teenager. Not the way you mean, with the dating and the phoning and the acting goofy. On the other hand, maybe I should make up for it now. Turn sweet sixteen instead of freakin’ fifty.”

“Now
that
is a brilliant idea!” Marti exclaimed.

As if on cue, a server emerged at my elbow with a slab of pine nut roll the size of a cedar shingle crowned with a single lit candle. I shot my lunch partner a poisonous arrow of a look. She’d done this dirty deed behind my back.

“
Feliz cumpleaños, Señora
,” the handsome young waiter said, placing the pinwheel of custard and cake in front of me.

“Señor
ita.
And she’s going to be fifty—can you believe that?” Marti drawled in her Georgia accent.

“Oh jeez,” I said through gritted teeth. “Thanks a lot.”

The waiter managed a reserved smile.

“Blow, honey.” She glanced up at him. “Her, not you. Come on, Judith, make your wish.”

I closed my eyes and fervently wished the waitstaff wouldn’t burst into the happy birthday song.

My wish was granted, but after the server backed off, I hissed at Marti, “I can’t believe you did this. My birthday’s not until June.”

“Big whoppin’ deal. A few months.” She extended a finger, plowed a line of pine nuts off the custard, and sucked. “Basic rule of thumb: Never turn down cake. And you can consider this your first party. Your pre-party. Didn’t your mama ever tell you there’s no such thing as too many parties?”

Grace Raphael (née Ryang Yun Mi), the former party girl, no longer knew from parties after my father skipped town two weeks after my sixth birthday. His business as a purveyor of lox and whitefish was floundering when he went west for a national smoked-fish conference, caught a live one—a rich, older woman—and never looked back. Lorna Chippendale aka “the chippie” aka the second Mrs. Raphael wasn’t inclined to share her bounty with Irwin’s first family and he wasn’t punctilious about child support. Right after the split, he sent some money, some herring, a few presents. Then he faded away.

On her salary as a sewing machine operator at a bathing suit factory, my mother made sure we had enough to eat and a roof over our heads. And music lessons for me. Which were, in her mind, as much a necessity as milk and bread. There wasn’t much left over for indulgences.

“I never had a birthday party in my life. At least none I can remember,” I said, not uncheerily thanks to the sangria.

My confession precipitated an astounded whisk of breath. Then Marti said, “You never told me that. If that isn’t the most pitiful thing I’ve ever heard. Makes me want to cry.” She was a tough broad; tears were generally off-limits. She wasn’t crying now, but her classic features were squinched in sympathy. “You never had a birthday party. We’ve got to rectify that.” Her eyes were way too bright. “Lordy, Lordy, I am so ready to rectify.”

“Marti . . .”

“Okay, I’m thinking fifty guests. One for each year of your life. And a theme.” A warning tingle fired through me as Marti waxed enthusiastic. “You have to have a theme. Hawaii is hot this year. Leis, mai tais with the little umbrellas. And the men could wear those tacky flowered shirts.”

She was putting me on with the Hawaiian business. Maybe. You never knew with Marti.

Oh God.

• • •

“Of course you have birthday party,” my mother said later that afternoon. “First-year party,
Tol
, very important in Korea. Baby survive so we celebrate. In Korea, party held in banquet hall but I have only few Korean friends so we hold at home. Many balloons. Many gifts. You wear
hanbok
and I put makeup on you, like tradition. Aunt Phyllis try to make cake like
saeng
cream cake with canned fruit.” She threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, so awful. But she try.”

We were in the activity room of Blumen House, the assisted living complex where my mother lived. Really, the activity room was
where
she lived. She dropped into her fourth-floor apartment for sleep and breakfast, and took lunch and dinner in the communal dining room. But mornings were spent in the activity room playing gin rummy and canasta, afternoons were dedicated to mah-jongg marathons, and betweentimes she gambled online on one of the computers provided for residents.

I’d waited fifteen minutes for her to finish her mah-jongg game, which was conducted with all the fervor of a blood sport. Because she’d won the two-dollar pot, she was in a good mood.

“You pick out violin, remember I tell you.”

I did remember the story of how I reached for the miniature violin over the stethoscope and the thread of long life on a table of objects set before me, but not that it happened at my first birthday party. I thought the choice that predicted my future had been made at one of my mother’s fortune-telling sessions with Lulu Cho. My childhood memories were spotty, a protective device, no doubt.

“Okay, first birthday,” I said. “Were there any after that with friends my own age?”

“You were not friendly girl, Judith. Not many friends.”

It was tough making them, I refrained from telling her, when you were shuttled to five schools in twelve years.

Every time the landlord raised our rent, we downshifted to an apartment for less money and the bonus of a free month. Lulu Cho’s husband had a truck. He moved us, looking sadder and sadder as the neighborhoods got seedier and seedier.

“You have just one friend. Brenda Himmelstein. You love Brenda Himmelstein. Only one.”

Third to fifth grade. My longest stretch in one school, PS 139, and my happiest because of Brenda Himmelstein with her normal family, her salesclerk mother, her bookkeeper father, even a brother who was a pain in the ass. She called me Mutt for my mixed background, but affectionately, and I called her Rusty for her red hair, and we lived in each other’s pockets. Then the landlord raised the rent on our one-bedroom walk-up a block from the Himmelsteins and we tumbled way down to Bedford-Stuyvesant. Junior high school was hell. The few white girls on one side of the cafeteria, the majority black on the other—everyone ready to rumble—and me in no-man’s-land, the Chinese (they never made the distinction; I let it ride) dork in thick glasses who had to leave early for her cello lessons and raised her hand in class too much.