None of this Ever Really Happened (11 page)

Lydia crossed her arms again and turned away to look
out the window. Then she turned back. "Look, Pete, none of
that matters. What does matter is that there's something going
on with us. I feel like I'm standing on the shore and you're
going out to sea and all I can do is just watch."

"Well," I said, a bit uncomfortable with her sudden familiarity,
"what about ships passing in the night?"

"What do you mean?"

Once when it was I who was feeling insecure, I told Lydia
that I felt like we were ships passing in the night, and she said,
"That's my definition of a perfect relationship: ships passing
in the night."

"Pete, that was years ago. That was before Mexico. That
was before I knew how to have a relationship. I was scared.
I was just a girl."

"And all that's changed?"

"Of course it's changed. I love you. I want to know what's
happening."

"Oh Jesus," I said; suddenly the room felt small and hot.
"I can't talk about this right now. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." I must
have sounded shrill or desperate because she backed right
off. "I need time to think. I need time to myself." This I just
blurted out. I really hadn't even thought it before, and had
she ignored or dismissed it, I might have never mentioned it
again, but she didn't.

"Well," she said, "you have this canoe trip as soon as
school's out. That's ten days of time to think."

"I need more. Maybe after that I'll go up to the cottage for
a while." Although I wasn't looking at her, I felt her stiffen.

"How long is a while?"

"I don't know," I said with more annoyance in my voice
than I wanted. "A few days, a few weeks." Then to myself but
not to Lydia I said, "Give me the summer. Just give me until
the end of the summer to figure things out." None of this had
I planned or even thought about, but instantly it felt like the
perfect, the only, the essential solution to a big problem I had
only been vaguely aware of until a few minutes earlier.

"That's fine. Take all the time you need. Do whatever
you need to." We both wanted very much for this conversation
to be over, and now it was, and we didn't know what to
do. "Well," said Lydia, "I'm going to make some tea. Want
some tea?"

"I think I'll walk Art."

"You just walked him. You can smoke in here," she said.
"Just sit by the window."

I opened the window and sat by it and blew smoke out of
it. She busied herself in the kitchen, and there was the comforting
clink and clatter of teacups and teakettle.

"By the way," she called to me, "did you take three hundred
dollars out of our joint savings a couple of weeks ago?"

I rode my bike up the lakeshore into Highland Park against
a north wind. It was cold and hard going, and I got a good
workout, but coming back I sailed. Everyone was already
crowded around a table in the oyster bar at Davis Street making
funny, profane toasts to sloth, idleness, debauchery, dissipation,
and two or three other vices.

"Chilly out there," someone commented.

"I should say. When's this damn weather going to break?
I hate spring in Chicago." I got a pint of Guinness and raised
it to Carolyn and Wendy, who were still in their work clothes
but who were now wearing oversized T-shirts over their
tailored
suits. They were bright yellow and said Eurotrash
Girls across the fronts.

"So this is it?" I said. "Last day of work?"

"Last day until sometime in September," Carolyn said,
clinking my glass.

"Last day forever," said Wendy, who claimed to have a plan
that would allow her to never work another day in her life.

"What's your plan?" I asked.

She winked. Wendy and Carolyn are about as different as
two friends can be, except that they are both smart. Wendy
grew up a working-class kid in Berwyn, Illinois, and was the
first member of her family to go to college; she had a brief,
early marriage and is tough, brash, and aggressive in a way
that has made her an outstanding, highly paid corporate attorney,
who loves to drink beer, shoot pool, close bars, and
who doesn't always go home alone. Carolyn is single, shy,
subtle, thoughtful, discreet, stable. Each is what the other
might secretly want to be, just a little bit.

"Where'd you get the shirts?" I asked.

"Officer Lotts."

Someone sang out, "Eurotrash girls," and we toasted.

Lydia knocked on the window from the sidewalk, then
hurried in. Having come from the train, she, too, wore work
clothes. She hugged me from behind with one arm and
kissed me on the cheek as if Tuesday night had not happened.
She got a glass of white wine and crowded into the table. She
seemed confident and natural in ways I did not feel. I watched
her with our friends as they talked and drank and laughed.
She looked so happy. They looked so happy.

Someone else said, "So tell us about this trip."

"Oh, jeez," said Wendy. There was a villa in Aix-en-Provence
that a couple she knew from law school was renting
for the month of June. They'd start out there. There was
a week of hiking in the Swiss Alps with some other friends.
"You met the Thumas, didn't you?" Wendy asked me.

"Sure," I said.

Then they were going to Prague, then "into Hungary to
look for Wendy's lost identity," said Carolyn. After that they
planned a week of R and R on the Amalfi coast in a small
hotel they'd read about somewhere, then on to the Greek
islands.

"God, I'd love to be going with you," said Lydia, and I
knew that she meant it.

"Why don't you, then?" asked Wendy. "Why don't you
guys come join us in Switzerland for a week. You ever been to
Lauterbrunnen?" Wendy described a narrow mountain valley
with a flat, lush floor and sheer two thousand–foot walls
over which one stream after another stepped into space, creating
a dozen little waterfalls and rainbows everywhere you
looked.

Lydia turned to me.

Wendy talked about taking cogwheel trains and cable
cars up into the mountains in the mornings, hiking all day
in pastures filled with wildflowers and cows wearing cowbells,
surrounded all the time by snowcapped peaks, then
taking your shoes off and sitting in beer gardens afterward.

"Write a couple of your pieces about it. Cover some of
your expenses," urged Carolyn.

"This isn't just the wine speaking?" Lydia wanted to know.

"Of course not," said Wendy. She told us to book into the
Hotel Oberland and get a front room, so our windows, complete
with window boxes full of red geraniums, would swing
open right on the Jungfrau and the Eiger. "Big, soft quilt to
sleep under. Downstairs in the restaurant they have a fish
tank full of trout. You point out the one you want, and ten
minutes later they bring it to you grilled."

"Sounds wonderful," I said. "When are you going to be
there?"

"We meet Dick and Martha on the veranda of the Oberland
for lunch on June 17."

"I can't do it," I said. "Maybe Lydia can—"

"Why can't you?" asked Wendy.

"Oh, I'm chaperoning a wilderness canoe thing up in
Canada with a group from school; I'll be gone."

"Get someone to take your place," said Steve.

"Too late. Besides, I told the
Trib
I'd do a piece on it."

"On a bunch of teenagers on a canoe trip?" asked someone.
"Who'd want to read about that?"

"Well," I said, "I was going to leave the kids out. Just write
a kind of me-and-nature thing."

"He thinks," said Lydia, "that high school boys wearing
Ray-Bans and lighting farts around the campfire might detract
from the Thoreauvian quality of the piece."

"Can you do that?" asked Wendy.

There followed a fairly heated debate on the decay of
journalistic standards and whether or not travel and other
soft-feature writers have the same moral obligation to truth
and accuracy as those writing on the front and op-ed pages.

"God, I need a cigarette," I said finally. "Ask that guy with
the mustache if I can bum a cigarette."

"Change the subject!" said Lydia. "He hasn't had a cigarette
in two days."

"Okay," said Carolyn, "I need a dog sitter or a house sitter,
or both. Anyone know of a reliable friend or relative who
wants a place to stay for the summer?"

She needed someone to take care of her old Australian
shepherd, Cooper, while she was gone, but her ads had been
answered almost exclusively by college-age boys who were
way too interested in being just two blocks from Wrigley
Field and who she imagined holding Cooper over the back
porch railing to pee and using her splintered Mission style
furniture to build late-night bonfires on the roof deck.

Wendy was now trying to convince Lydia that we should
join them in France.

"I really can't," I interrupted.

"Why not?"

"He's got to solve the crime of the century," said Lydia.

There was a pause. Then Officer Lotts said, "This doesn't
have to do with that Korean chick, does it?"

"Not exactly."

"Oh Jesus Christ," said Steve.

"But kind of?" asked someone.

"Kind of, I guess."

"Oh Christ. Pete, you know what?" said Steve. "You're going
a little nutty on us here. I think you need to talk to someone.
That's what I'd do if I went a little nutty; I'd get right in
there and talk to someone." He left the table suddenly. There
was an awkward pause in the conversation.

"It's even part of my plan," Wendy said into the vacuum.
"How do you think I got the moxie to quit my job? I went to
a counselor." Together they'd decided Wendy was unhappy
because she needed some time off. So that was Wendy's plan:
quit her job, go to Europe, spend all her money, sue her counselor
for malpractice, settle out of court, then open a chain
of McDonald's in Uruguay or Chile and get involved in local
politics.

"Bravo!" someone said. We toasted justice and the American
way, self-interest, Machiavelli, and abject amorality.
Later I got into a conversation with Carolyn at the end of the
table and asked her directly if she'd ever gone to a shrink.

She hesitated. "Yes, when my father died."

"Did it help?"

"It did."

Much later I pushed my bike home and Lydia walked beside
me. We were both quiet much of the way. Finally Lydia
said, "I'm sorry I said that about the crime of the century."

"Okay."

We were quiet again until she said, "I want you to do me
a favor. When you get back from Canada, I don't want you to
go up to the cottage. If you need to do this thing, if you need
some time, stay in Carolyn's place and take care of Cooper
for her."

"What difference does it make where I stay?"

It somehow did. "Carolyn's is neutral ground. Stay there
and help her out. Please. Will you do that for me?"

I told her that I'd already intended to go to the cottage for
the weekend to grade papers. I did not much like Lydia telling
me what to do with my freedom before I even had it, but
I didn't like hurting her, either. I didn't like that at all. I told
her I'd think about staying at Carolyn's, and, in an effort to
change the subject, I said, "You know, you can go to Europe
by yourself if you want to."

"Of course I can." As she bristled, I was reminded of two
things: just how fiercely independent Lydia had once been,
and just how much she had changed without my really noticing.
It should be said, however, that neither her fierceness
nor her independence had come naturally. Rather, they
had been foisted upon her by careless parents who spent almost
all their time fighting, complaining about each other,
feeling sorry for themselves, and ignoring her. As a result
she had become very tough and oddly territorial. Most of
us are capable of being possessive about small spaces, duties,
achievements, lovers, and sometimes friends. Lydia had
been possessive about everything. She had divided the world
quite clearly between hers and yours. Jack Purcell tennis shoes
had been hers; I hadn't been allowed to own a pair. Glenn's
Diner had been her restaurant. No matter how many times
I ate there, I had always been an interloper. She had owned
it. She had owned asparagus, Wedgwood blue, Virginia
Woolf, the coast of Maine, all Woody Allen movies, the word
"ennui," Auguste Renoir, and autumn, and she hadn't been
very interested in sharing any of them. She hadn't been interested
in sharing music at all, except Django Reinhardt. She
had loved Jerry Jeff Walker until I had borrowed a CD, and
she'd found it in my car one day. "What's this doing here?"
she had asked.

"I've been listening to it," I'd said. "I like it."

She handed it to me. "Here. It's yours." As far as I know,
she never listened to it again. Now it seemed that she cared
much less about "her things." Either that or I had become one
of them.

Why had I answered so quickly that I couldn't go to Europe?
I had the time; I had the money. I guess I didn't want to go; I
wanted to stay home and get to the bottom of this Lisa Kim
thing. Or maybe I didn't want to go with Lydia, not just when
I had won some breathing space. Or maybe it was some of all
of that. And if I really wanted to find out about Lisa Kim, why
had I signed on for the canoe trip? But I knew the answer
to that one. I'd done so at a time when I was spending half
my days running after Lisa Kim, and half running away from
her, thinking that if I ran fast and far enough, my life might
get back to normal. It happened on a day when I was running
away from her. I said yes, and just to seal it before I changed
my mind, I pitched my idea for an article to the
Trib
travel
people, and they said yes, and so I was committed. Good.
Now I wasn't so sure.

I called Carolyn the next day and told her I'd take care of
Cooper if she couldn't find anyone else to, but I didn't mention
staying in her condo. I also asked more about the counselor
she had seen, and finally, if she would mind giving me
his name. "No," she said, although I wasn't so sure. Was she
territorial, too? "Gene Brooke; he's in the book."