Wish Club (7 page)

What had happened between dinner and now?
All through dinner he’d seemed so cool and smart and witty, but sometime during coffee and before the check, he had gone off on a verbal excursion, a rant about himself and his dull job as a suit somewhere downtown. He’d kept talking and talking, on and on, and at one point when she’d tried to interject something about herself he’d said, “Well, I don’t know art, but I know what I like.” She had decided right then that there would never be a second date with the moron Darrin.

The line for the Ferris wheel hadn’t been too long, made up mostly of a large tour group of Korean men. Jill couldn’t help thinking,
Who comes to Chicago on a tour—in January?
When their turn had come, Darrin had said he wasn’t feeling well, that maybe the shrimp scampi he’d eaten for dinner wasn’t agreeing with him—but she’d noticed the way he had looked fearfully at the top of the huge wheel. “Just go on ahead,” he’d said. “I don’t want to ruin your fun.”

This was never my idea of fun.

“I’ll wait for you over there.” He pointed toward the carousel.

More your speed? Little horsies and ponies and only two axes?
“Oh please. It’s okay,” she told him. He had no idea
how
okay it really was. “Let’s just forget about it.” But she’d started to think it might be a good opportunity to get away from him for a while.

“No really. You should just do it. I’ll be fine. Besides, we’ve already paid for the tickets.”

Yes they had. Split them fifty-fifty, just like dinner. It had been partly her doing anyway; she’d offered to pay her half and in spite of wanting to believe she was a modern woman living in a modern age, she had been a bit miffed that he’d taken her up on it. Jill supposed she couldn’t blame him for wanting to share the cost of the date: it sounded like he was going through a rough patch of first dates like she was, and for a while there she almost felt sorry for him. She couldn’t really fault him for not wanting to invest any more of his money on a date that, more than likely, would lead nowhere. Dating must be as miserable for him as it was for her.

Michael had been her last semi-serious boyfriend; they’d dated for nearly six months, the previous summer and autumn. Jill had started noticing signs of trouble with him early in the fall, when he’d begun talking about “their” future, and had developed a new possessiveness. It was such a difference; in the beginning, he had seemed so
not
looking for a wife. It was precisely his lack of clinginess that had attracted her to him in the first place, the fact that he didn’t need to know where she was every hour of the day that they weren’t together.

Jill had rebelled against this change in him, playing little head games: not returning his calls promptly, being unnecessarily vague in telling him her whereabouts. In truth, she’d been working long hours at the studio, but her capriciousness had of course caused him to suspect all sorts of things, and she’d never done anything to assuage his fears. When he’d asked her to lunch in November, she knew. He must have thought he was being so smart, so coy—but she knew. They’d never met for lunch before.

He’d told her he didn’t want to see her anymore, that the relationship wasn’t “going in the right direction,” whatever that meant. Jill hadn’t put up a fight. She never did in this situation. She had worn a bored expression, acting not the least bit affected. It was a trick she’d learned from her mother, the first time her father had left.

“But you didn’t say
anything.
You just let him go.” Jill had been confounded.

“What do you think would hurt him more,” her mother had asked, “acting like I cared, or acting like I didn’t?”

When Michael had slid his chair back from the table at the restaurant, the legs had made an excruciatingly loud noise as they scraped over the hardwood floor. He stood up, looking around nervously to see if anyone had noticed. After all, that had been the entire point of coming there: to avoid a scene.

A crisp one-hundred-dollar bill lay balancing on its side on the table. He’d chosen not to wait around for the check. Instead he pulled the bill out of his gold money clip, saying, “This should cover it.”

Jill watched him slide the chair back under the table more carefully after he stood. He gave her a parting half-smile, which faded quickly under her calm stare. Then he walked away down the long aisle of the restaurant and disappeared around the corner without looking back.

After Michael had left, Jill sipped at her martini alone. Michael’s plan had been effective. To all outward appearances, her date had left lunch early to get back to work. She had known he’d chosen to meet over lunch because he didn’t want any complications. It was a jerky thing to do, a way to avoid any real conversation about why the relationship had failed, avoid any discussion of real feelings. He obviously hadn’t understood Jill enough to know she didn’t care much for the discussion of feelings.

Jill had left the martini unfinished, next to the one-hundred-dollar bill, still standing on its side on the table. It was too bad. Michael’s plot wasn’t necessary. Jill wouldn’t have caused a scene over him anywhere.

Her basket hit the bottom and a Navy Pier worker opened the gate. She stepped out onto the platform, the wheel never stopping, continuing its slow-motion turn.

She looked around for Darrin, walking over to the side of the carousel near the water where she’d spotted him last, then walking all around it. She made a wider search of the area, but he was nowhere to be found. It took a while before it dawned on her, but once it did, she exhaled sharply in disbelief. She’d been ditched in the middle of her date—by a man afraid of Ferris wheels.

As she walked back down the pier, the city lights sparkled on the lake. She passed couples holding hands, or with their arms wrapped around one another, or fighting, with tight expressions of disagreement on their faces—the full relationship spectrum. Jill tried to ignore them as she made her way down to the cab stand at the front of the pier, where she could get a taxi home.

Candlelight
flickered burgundy through the wineglass sitting on her nightstand, Dan’s empty Scotch glass beside it. He was asleep already, his breathing steady and deep. Claudia was always thirsty after sex. Tonight her mouth felt especially cottony from the wine, but she didn’t want to get out of bed. The radiators had started their nighttime schedule and the air in their bedroom was growing cool; she could feel the chill on the tip of her nose.

Instead she lay there, letting her worries whipsaw through her head. It shouldn’t be any big deal if they had to wait another year or two for Dan to start his business. But what if Dan now thought they should wait to have a baby? It seemed like she’d already waited too long. It had taken forever to convince him to start trying in the first place. Besides, they could fit a baby in the apartment, a lot of people did that—little babies didn’t take up that much room. They could wait to get a condo or bigger place when they had their second one. If that was really the issue. Money.

Claudia rolled over onto her side, away from Dan, and pulled the blanket up, covering her mouth and nose. She knew she would probably go along with him, end up back on the Pill for another year. But if they weren’t trying to have a baby, if they didn’t have a baby, then she’d have no excuse for not writing.
Was that the real reason she wanted to get pregnant? To have an excuse?
Claudia shut her eyes tight.

That’s not it,
she told herself. Pregnant or not, writing or not, the real issue was that she was worried about Dan. He was so talented and she hated watching him get discouraged—especially when he took it out on her. All those years in school, “archi-torture” school they called it and for good reason, and he didn’t have anything very exciting to show for it. Not what he’d envisioned, anyway. Not like Howard Roark.

He had a stack of drawings in their office, his “noodlings” he called them, and Claudia was pretty sure he didn’t think she knew how very serious he was about them. They were drawings of houses. His houses. Various floor plans and elevations. It was brilliant stuff—the stuff of his dreams. And now those dreams would be postponed again. They both had known going into it that it was going to take some time for him to realize his dream. It just got harder and harder each time they thought they were close to watch it slip a little farther away.

The air under the covers was getting too stuffy. Claudia slid the blanket off her nose and opened her eyes. She was still thirsty and she eyed her wineglass on the nightstand, the light from the candle glimmering faintly behind it.

Dan stirred next to her. “Are you going to blow that out? I can’t sleep with it.”

Claudia smiled. She slid the comforter down and got up, pulling it back over her place on the bed.

“Where are you going?”

“To the bathroom, if that’s okay with you.” She laughed. As if she would just get up and leave him right now, as if he thought she might be off to run naked errands in the middle of the night.

Claudia drank two glasses of water before filling one to take back to Dan. She’d only had one glass of wine, but it felt like the beginning of a hangover coming on. When she opened the medicine cabinet for some aspirin, the smell of their sex rose up off of her and she could feel the warm trickle of its aftermath start down her leg, making it all the way to her ankle before she could grab a tissue.

Dan’s lovemaking had been different tonight—not aggressive, not really…just, not gentle. He had held her so tightly while he thrusted that she had thought she might stop breathing. It was as though all the rage and fear of the day were coming through him and he needed to hold her tight to ground himself, to keep himself from flying apart in a million directions.

It had been wonderful.

She drank a sip of Dan’s water with her aspirin, then refilled the glass before taking it back with her to the bedroom. He was asleep again by the time she returned. Claudia blew out the candle and crawled under the covers, her place still as warm as when she had left it.

Chapter Seven

Claudia
pushed the miniature shopping cart down the produce aisle at the Wild Prairie Market, wondering if the size of the basket was one of those mind tricks, like in dieting: if you put your food on a smaller plate, it tricks your mind into thinking you’ve eaten more. If you put two hundred dollars’ worth of groceries in a Lilliputian cart, it tricks your wallet into thinking you’ve gotten your money’s worth.

The February Book Club meeting was at her house tonight. She probably should have just gone to Jewel, it would have been faster, but she wanted the food to be extra nice. She wanted pretentious, trendy little snacks and fruit tortes, and she’d come to the right store, since there was no place more pretentious than the place she was in now, “Where Everything is Alimentary!” Even Claudia thought she could have written a better tag line than that. And she knew Gail certainly could have. Back in the day, when Gail was a climber at Foote, Cone and Belding, she’d been the copywriter on the Sunshine Orange Juice campaign. The jingle “Happy Days Start with Happy Rays!” was a phrase that, at the time, was as kitschy-popular as Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” or “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” Gail kept her Clio in the office at her house.

Claudia had been proud of her friend, but to tell the truth, Gail sure seemed a lot happier now. In the few short years she’d been at Foote, Cone, each time Claudia had seen her it had seemed like a little bit more of the life had been sucked out of her, like watching the colored syrup get drained out of a snow cone.

Claudia put a small basket of grape tomatoes in her cart and turned the corner, nearly hitting a braless woman reading the ingredients on a hummus container. The woman flashed annoyance at Claudia before quickly collecting herself, putting on a thin smile, and going back to reading her label. Jeez, Claudia thought, people here are so pretentious, they even pretend not to be mad at you.

She wove her way through the narrow aisles, picking up miniature melba toasts and sun-dried tomato cream cheese, dodging shoppers reading labels or trying to decide which type of bland organic canned goods they should buy. She got biscotti for the coffee, a fruit torte, and some cookies from the bakery counter. The food she had in her cart would scarcely fill one paper shopping bag and she knew it would cost over a hundred dollars. Dan’s going to shit, she thought. She glanced at her watch while standing in line. She still had time to run down to Sam’s Wines and Spirits; he couldn’t be mad at her for shopping there. And they had to have wine.

The man in front of her pulled out a pile of dirty cloth grocery bags from under his cart and sanctimoniously laid them on the conveyor belt with his groceries. He glanced sideways at Claudia’s cart in the not very discreet way men have of checking something out, and Claudia just knew he was disapproving of her ecoterrorist ways, of her destroying the world one disposable grocery bag at a time.

She folded her arms across her chest and pretended to be interested in something on the far side of the store, near the juice bar. She scanned over the menu written in chalk above the counter. Sitting at one of the little tables, reading a book, was a woman with gray hair. Claudia could only see the top of her head and forehead, but she was certain it was the woman from the bookstore, the woman whose books she’d ended up buying. Could it really be her?

“Hell-o,” the cashier greeted Claudia with what sounded to her like barely concealed disdain, and she felt as though he were eyeing her food as if it were a competition entry. She turned around again to see if the woman was still in the juice bar. It would be cool to talk to her again, Claudia thought, maybe ask her about the books she’d left. Or how she had managed to disappear from a bookstore in broad daylight. When Claudia turned around, the bagger was staring at her, waiting with his pierced eyebrows arched.

“I’m sorry, what?” Claudia asked.

“Paper or plastic?”

“Oh, um, paper I guess.”

“One-o-three ninety-six,” the cashier said. She handed him her debit card and he pointed to the electronic box in front of her.
Amateur,
Claudia could hear him think. She swiped her card and waited for the cashier input, the familiar sound of the receipt printing out.

“It’s not going through for some reason. Try swiping it again.”

Claudia felt heat rise up from her neck to her face and ears as she swiped the card through again.
Oh God, please let this go through. Did Dan mail that Visa bill? I told him not to….

“It’s not going through. It’s saying insufficient funds in your account.” Claudia stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t know what the problem is. I just took out an ATM this morning, maybe that’s the trouble—I took out too much money this morning.” She smiled at him, but she could tell he didn’t believe it either. “Well anyway.” She handed him her regular Visa card. “Try this.”

He pointed back at the electronic control pad in front of her. “You need to swipe it through.” His tone was sympathetic. She hadn’t been expecting that.

They waited. She stared at the keypad, willing the word
approved
to appear. She tried a glance at the woman behind her in line, but instead of the smile Claudia had been hoping for, the woman just looked quickly away, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Claudia wiped some sweat from her upper lip.

The register receipt started printing out. Claudia waved the front panel of her jacket back and forth a couple of times.
Thank God.
A cloud of relief enveloped all of them.

The cashier handed her the receipt. “Sign please,” he said, the low-level disdain returning to his voice.

She signed and got behind her cart while watching the juice bar, wanting to put this scene behind her. The woman was still sitting there, her brows knitted together over her reading glasses, as if she were very concerned about what she was reading. Her hair was pulled back into a bun today, taking away her hippie-like aura, making her seem almost professorial.

Claudia turned her cart in that direction.
I’ll just park it outside and pretend I’m getting a drink to take with me and then she’ll either notice me or I can pretend to notice her and…

“You forgot your receipt,” the cashier called after her, the words
you idiot
hanging unsaid in the air. Claudia turned back with a laugh, shaking her head at herself. “Oh. Thanks,” she said. She made a face.
Silly me.
“Don’t want to forget that.”

She smiled at him, but he just looked at her, his initial coldness returning in its entirety. Claudia could just feel him exchange a look with the bagger after she’d turned around. “Hell-o.” He greeted the woman that had been behind her in line.

The woman in the café was still sitting at her table reading when Claudia approached the juice bar. She left her cart outside the railing that separated the small restaurant from the grocery store, worrying about the sun-dried tomato cream cheese that needed to get to a refrigerator.

Claudia scanned the overhead menu, careful to stand in the woman’s line of sight, but the woman didn’t look up.
The crystal.
Claudia started searching her purse for the crystal the woman had dropped at the bookstore. She’d been carrying it around in her pockets, hoping it would bring her good luck or answers or something. That was up until the previous week, when she’d found it on the floor of her classroom next to her desk and decided that, since it was such a slippery little thing, she’d be better off keeping it at home. She’d dropped it into her purse.

Claudia held her head close to the top of her bag while she searched.
Where is it? It’s got to be in here—I don’t remember taking it out. I guess I must have. Damn. It would have been the perfect ice-breaker.

The little café was almost full. It only had four tables; each one could seat two, maybe three people. Claudia thought it might work out, if the couple in front of her took the last table, that she could ask the woman to share hers—although the woman might think it strange that Claudia would sit down and drink a cup of coffee while she watched her cart of groceries defrost.

She ordered a small latte and glanced back while the espresso machine steamed her milk. A juice machine whirred in the background, too. It was not the most serene place to read a book, Claudia thought. Maybe that’s what the woman had been frowning about.

Claudia didn’t understand why she felt so drawn to her, why she felt compelled to talk to her. It was true the woman had a calming presence; Claudia remembered the chills she’d felt when she’d watched her run her hands over the books at the bookstore. She seemed so confident and poised. “Don’t apologize,” she’d said. She was like the anti-Claudia.

When her coffee was ready she took it from the counter and turned around to look at the woman, who had just stood up with her back to Claudia. She was wearing a thick black turtleneck sweater over black slacks and she looked thinner than Claudia remembered. It must be the black, or maybe the skirt she’d been wearing the last time had made her look bigger.

Claudia had an awful revelation.
What if all the long skirts I wear make me look fatter?
She couldn’t deny that the woman was not shaped as much like an avocado as she remembered. Claudia quickly checked that thought, for fear of provoking another comment along the lines of “I don’t much care for avocados.”

The title of the book the woman had been reading was visible under her hand:
A Prayer for Owen Meany.

“That’s a wonderful book,” Claudia blurted, happy at having found a way to break into conversation with her. “Do you like Irving?”

The woman turned toward Claudia, assessing her over the rims of her black reading glasses.

“Do I know you?” she asked, and Claudia wanted to die.
Okay, maybe this wasn’t such a great idea.

The woman seemed to sense her consternation. “No, dear. I meant, have we met before? I feel like I know you from somewhere.”

“I met you at the bookstore. Barnes and Noble? We weren’t properly introduced, but,” Claudia laughed nervously, “I mean, we never exchanged names, but we spoke briefly. You picked out some books, a stack and—I think you dropped your crystal. I still have it…just not with me, but if you want I could get it to you.”

“Well,” the woman paused, as if she were enjoying the refreshing moment of silence, “I’ve always believed that crystals come to you when they’re meant to be yours and leave you when they’ve done all they can for you.”

Claudia nodded in agreement, as if she understood this.

“What kind of crystal was it? What did it look like?”

Claudia held her thumb and forefinger about two inches apart. “Quartz, about this long, and very thin. I found it on the floor right after you left.”

“Hmm,” she paused, “I don’t think I…No. Wait. I did have a crystal like that once…I thought I’d lost it ages ago.” The woman thought for a long moment. “Maybe it had been in that skirt pocket all along. I hadn’t worn
that
skirt in ages. Ha! Well, either way, I think you should keep it.”

“Really? I can keep it? Oh. Well, thank you.”

The woman put her book into a black leather handbag even larger than the one Claudia carried. She took her coat, a black cape with a velvet collar and velvet trim around the pockets, and swung it around her shoulders. She started buttoning the large round buttons that went down the front.

“I’d better go, too.” Claudia nodded at her parked cart. “Got a cart full of groceries I need to get home.” She laughed. “Just needed a little afternoon pick-me-up.” She held her latte up to eye level and gave a little shrug.

The woman watched Claudia, a good-natured smile in her eyes.

Claudia tried to settle back down into herself. No more acting the goof. “You know,” Claudia took a deep breath, “I was wondering, since you’re an Irving fan and all, I mean this will probably sound strange just having met you, but if you like to read, I’m having a—”

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” blared loudly from the gaping top of the woman’s handbag. “Excuse me, dear.” She reached into her bag and pulled out her phone. “Hello…Mmm. Hmm.”

Claudia stood for a moment, waiting for the woman to finish her call, but she didn’t want to appear to be eavesdropping so she stepped back a few paces and looked politely away. But that felt totally awkward, so she decided to leave, slowly, so the woman could catch up to her if she wanted to, if it were a short call. Claudia waved a timid good-bye at her and pointed toward the exit. The woman nodded and smiled without pausing her conversation. “No, no—don’t do that,” she said and Claudia stopped her departure, before realizing the woman had been talking into her phone.

Claudia nodded and waved again and watched the woman sit back down into the chair she had just vacated, her gigantic purse now resting on her lap.

Claudia put the grocery bags into the trunk of her car and walked the cart the whole way back to the store, putting her cart back into the queue—pushing it all the way in snug. She gave one last look into the store and then walked back to her car. When it started up, the clock on the dash said 4:30 p.m.
Damn it.
It would really be pushing it to try to get all the way down to Sam’s and back, especially since rush hour had begun. She’d have to pick up the wine at Rick and Dave’s Lakeview Liquors now and hope Dan didn’t have a cow about the price.