CHARLIE AND JENNA HAD NEVER EATEN A REAL MEAL TOGETHER, and so, at the beginning of August, when Frank went to Washington, the two arranged to have dinner in the city. They would never, probably, be granted a whole night through, and the evening in a restaurant would have to serve as a token of the dream life. The plan had seemed a good one a few days earlier, but in the hours before it, Jenna was not sure. She had considered inviting him to the house and had decided she wasn’t up to the smell of him in the rooms, his fragrance something she’d have to flap out afterward, opening the windows, swishing away the smoke of him. She did not want her sin in Frank’s kitchen.
She was sitting at the table in the trattoria when Charlie came along on the other side of the street. His washed and pressed self was gleaming from half a block away, his Bora Bora cologne no doubt wafting down the avenue. She felt her heart tighten. He was wearing a creamy linen sports coat with light-gray trousers, and—she squinted—sandals with socks? As if he suddenly had become Italian to match the restaurant. Surely, she thought just then, surely all of him was the work of Mrs. Rider. Who were these people, the Riders! His hair would have product squirted lightly through it to make his curls more vivid. Softer but also bold. Like Charlie himself. Soft but bold. Two qualities that were not complementary.
When he came through the door, she stood and, leaning over the table, the two kissed quickly. “You look so beautiful, so beautiful.” He spoke in one low gusty breath, shaking his head in wonderment. That he was nervous made her heart go colder. It was unlikely that she was beautiful, especially in her present mood. She watched him taking up his napkin, unfolding it and spreading it carefully on his lap. “I like this place,” he whispered conspiratorially. “Leave it to you to find a restaurant like this, to discover it, to realize a good thing when you see it. They know you here, I’ll bet—I’ll bet they know exactly what you—”
The waiter had arrived at the table. “Good evening, gentlemens,” he said to Charlie. “I like very much, ah, to see you tonight.”
“Same here!” Charlie said. “It’s great to see you, too.”
Jenna had never hated him before. It had been wrong, she realized, to expose him to the light, to remove him—to remove them—from the Kewaskum Inn, that sanctuary for their most private selves. “Carlo, per favore, per incominciare, voglio forse caponata, prosciutto, e olivi, va bene? E una bottiglia di vino bianco, forse un Pino Grigio o un buon Orvieto, d’accordo?”
Carlo bowed and retreated. Charlie was staring at her. “Your voice in Italian. It’s even, it’s even more incredible than your English voice. You are—”
“My Italian allowed me to order wine and appetizers. This is not unimportant, but it has its limitations.” They should have met at a bar near Hartley. It would have been easy to feign innocence, and on his turf she could have happily gobbled up chicken wings and had beer by the pitcher. Although she had already made her choices, she studied the menu. “You once used pasta e fagioli in a rhyme to me,” she muttered.
Without thinking, he said, “The contribution of Mrs. Rider.”
“What?”
Jenna, he would admit, did not look as lovable when her brow was wrinkled, her frown lines were so severe, and she let her mouth hang open. “She had that dish at a restaurant when she was sixteen and has never stopped talking about it— Golly, you look good.” He was leaning halfway across the table. “I love your dress, the brownness of it, and the buttons. It looks French, not that I know what a French dress looks like, but if a dress could look French, then this dress does. The buttons remind me of Milk Duds. Do you remember eating Milk Duds and how they’d get mashed together into one gluey lump on the roof of your mouth? I love those buttons, I could eat them, I love the idea of you—”
“Stop!” she cried. “Please.” She had startled him away from the center of the table, startled him into the corner of his chair. “It’s probably best,” she went on, “if I order for both of us. That is, if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll love whatever you decide,” he said slowly, adjusting himself, coming forward, advancing a little. “Darling,” he added. He picked up the small bottle of olive oil next to the vase of begonias and he smiled at it, which made her dislike him even more. “How are you?” he murmured, as he replaced the bottle.
She laughed then, at the absurdity of him, the absurdity of the dinner, and it had not even yet begun. She laughed at how she’d fallen into all the love traps—imagining that the affair could go on forever, that their feelings would always be fresh, imagining that somehow they would grow old together in their separate households. Poor dumb Jenna and poor Charlie, the yokel. Poor unsuspecting Laura and Frank; poor Suzie and David Oberhaus; poor Vanessa, far from home.
“How am I?” she said. “Yesterday a colleague of mine tried to kill himself. I’d had warning about this from my producer, but I’d dismissed her without hearing her out.” David Oberhaus had taken an overdose of pain pills, just, apparently, as Suzie had feared. He had done this at home after his wife had phoned the program director at the station, telling him about Suzie. David’s daughter, another poor girl, had found him in time, so that he could wake up in the hospital to more shame. “I don’t know that I could have prevented it,” Jenna said, “but I should have listened to Suzie’s appeal. Probably I should have listened. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”
She stared at the centerpiece as she spoke. “And Vanessa. She falls in love at the drop of a hat. The boyfriends either have no ambition or no sense of humor or no job, or else they work all the time. She needs to ditch her Ph.D. and go to choosing school.” If only there were choosing school! It was remarkable how some of Vanessa’s friends went about their sex lives as if intercourse were on a to-do list, and when it didn’t suit, they easily cast aside the beau and found another, or did volunteer work instead. They seemed not to be vulnerable to beauty. “Also,” Jenna went on, “she sprained her wrist, so she’s having trouble doing simple tasks in the lab. Her purse was stolen in the emergency room, and she’s worried about identity theft. She can’t seem to get up in the morning without having a crisis. I can’t leave at the moment, can’t rush to St. Louis to hold her wounded hand.”
“You’re a good mother,” he said. “That’s obvious.”
“Obvious?” She snapped the menu shut. “I did the best I could, but that’s saying very little.” She should not have told him about David Oberhaus or about Vanessa. She never talked about Frank; Frank had nothing whatsoever to do with Charlie Rider. And Vanessa: even if Jenna wanted to, how could she explain the tailspin Vanessa could send her mother into by being disappointed in the seasoning of her entrée or sneezing or having a lonely day? Furthermore, Jenna could never admit that every now and then, for the smallest, sharpest measure of time, she wished for a different child, a better child, a child who was not as difficult.
Carlo soon brought the wine and the eggplant and olives. Jenna ordered for both of them: the pappardelle, and veal chops with garlic and anchovies, and boiled zucchini salad, which, she explained to Charlie, tasted far better than it sounded.
“Cool,” Charlie said.
The wine was nicely fruity with a mineral follow-through and a clean finish. She began to feel better despite Charlie’s having said Cool. “Love is merely a madness,” she thought, “and … something, something … deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do.” If Frank were along, he’d quote many of Rosalind’s lines, his favorite heroine in all of Shakespeare. If Frank were here—how ashamed she’d be. She took another swallow and for a moment closed her eyes. “Does your wife dress you, dear Charlie Rider?” She had always meant to ask.
“I am outfitted daily by Herself. Sometimes I am draped two or three times an hour by Mrs. Rider. I am her Ken doll.”
Jenna laughed. “Why do you let her?”
“Why do I let her?”
“Are you afraid of her?”
He took four bites, each a toothful, to polish off a small niçoise olive. “In a way, I probably am,” he said.
“What way?” Jenna said. She was beginning to enjoy herself.
“I’m afraid of a force in her. A force that is always there but lying low. A force that could spring up at any moment.”
“What kind of force?”
“Dissatisfaction, maybe, I’d call it. Unhappiness coiled and at the ready? Or rage, waiting in the wings?”
She wouldn’t say, but that was exactly the problem with Vanessa.
“I’ll tell you one thing. I’d like to tell you one thing, and that is, if I could go backward in time, I’d have children. I would have liked to be a father.” He was gazing into the street as if there before him were lined up the tykes of an alternative life.
“Charlie!” she said, touching his hand. He would have been as boyish and playful as his sons, all of them running around the yard after fireflies on a summer night, all of them tumbling into a hammock. She covered her mouth, and then, of all the terrible thoughts she’d had so far that hour, she entertained the worst: she imagined having Charlie’s baby, she, without a womb and nearly over-the-hill, bearing him a miracle, a rotund version of himself, a baby with luscious thighs and fat little fists, and the tear-shaped eyes, and a happy, toothless smile. She put her head into her napkin and—how mad!—began to cry.
“Honey, sweetie, it’s all right, it’s okay.” He reached over to stroke her forearm.
“But why didn’t you?” she choked. “Why didn’t you have them?”
“We made the decision not to spend the money and the time on Laura’s issues. Scar tissue down there, and a screwy cycle. We decided to concentrate on the farm and to enjoy our nieces and nephews. Laura has never liked doctors, and to her it didn’t seem worth it, the pain, the money, when there are enough people on the globe.”
Jenna wiped her eyes. The abstraction of doing good by not having children surely was cold comfort. As miserable as Vanessa often was, Jenna couldn’t bear the thought of the world without her child in it.
As she was considering what subject to put forth next, he reached into his pocket and retrieved several folded sheets of paper. “I made these for you,” he said, handing her the packet.
He had drawn portraits of the Knee family, Yardley in his shorts, Mary Ruth in a pinafore, Gerald looking downtrodden, as an orphan must, the parents beleaguered but loving. He had inked the drawings and filled them in with soft greens and blues and violets. “Charlie, oh, Charlie,” she whispered. How was it that he had filled her heart with hate one minute and won her back in the next?
The pappardelle came in its sauce of red and yellow peppers and sausages, and she moved the portraits out of the way. They were like drawings in an Edwardian children’s book, the outlines crisp, the girls in dresses, their hair in pigtails. He’d folded them up, as if he hadn’t thought enough of them to keep them uncreased, but they were beguiling, full of charming details, Yardley with a snake hanging out of his pocket, the mother holding her purse in front of her with both hands, the dog itching a flea, the butler’s cravat askew. Jenna said, “I can’t figure out how I got here.”
Charlie understood her meaning. “My wife,” he said. “My wife always wanted us to be friends.”
Jenna put her fork down. “She did?”
“She had a feeling we’d like each other.”
“But we met by accident. We ran into each other on Highway S.”
“That,” he said, “was the Silver People.”
“But how—?” She opened up the drawings again. Looking at them was like taking a sip of the love potion. One glance at Yardley Knee, at the accomplishment of the drawing, and she was his. She released herself into the world of Charlie Rider. She would keep referring to the papers through the pappardelle, and the veal, and the coffee, and once more when they were back at the Faroli-Voden house, in the guest room, where, she’d decided, she must bring him after all.
“Does Laura know about the Knees?” she whispered as he unbuttoned her shirt.
Charlie kissed Jenna’s neck. He wanted to be honest, and so he said what seemed truthful—in spirit, anyway. “Laura is in my knee right now,” he muttered. “Laura is always in my fucking knee.”