Chapter Eighteen

Flora sat at the kitchen table, writing out a grocery list. It was an hour before she would prepare for cocktails and dinner. She was therefore startled when she heard Will’s key in the door. She immediately stood up so she could look through the kitchen doorway to the top of the entry stairs to see what state he was in, if there was something wrong. He never came home early, even if his late-day patients cancelled.

Will saw her immediately and appeared unremorseful for startling her.

“Yes, I’m early, dear. Don’t be too put out. And don’t worry, nothing unfortunate has transpired.” He came up the stairs, into the kitchen where she stood in her stocking feet and hair net, and kissed her on the cheek.

“I have a surprise.”

He grasped her elbow and steered her back towards her seat at the table. He sat in the one just beside her; the ninety-degree arrangement differed from their dinner formation where they sat on opposite sides.

Flora was silent and acquiesced. She watched as Will pulled an envelope out of his inner jacket pocket and placed it on top of her grocery list. In the upper left corner of the envelope, she recognized the Mann’s Travel Agency logo. Flora would normally assume it was another trip to accompany him to a conference, but those relatively routine occurrences didn’t warrant such flourish or eagerness on his part. Usually those opportunities were presented as asides while he was engaged in something as mundane as grabbing a clumsy handful of peanuts out of the lotus bowl while looking at the newspaper or shouting from his bathroom where he might be trimming his nose hairs: “Flora, how would you like to join me in San Diego on February 22?”

“This is not a conference, is it?” she asked Will, his positive attentiveness such an unusual occurrence that she wished to prolong it.

“Open it. Stop dallying.” He leaned forward with his hands flat on the table, the way Toto looked when he wanted to play.

She picked up the envelope while looking at him, unable to keep a smile from working its way to her lips. Inside was a plane ticket, a document she had seen her way around enough to be able to decode the pertinent information rapidly. It was a round trip to Paris leaving in one month.

“August? Why … what ...?” He knew she wasn’t a fan of Paris in the summer, what with the pressing heat and the ubiquitous closures for les vacances. She looked at Will who motioned for her to look further. She saw there were three such tickets in the envelope, and in addition to one for her, there was another for Hayes, Beatrice and Hayes, Abby. “It’s at the end of the month, so your Berthillon glacier should be open again, and it won’t be so beastly. The tourists will have largely departed.”

“You’re not going?” Flora looked carefully again at the tickets to make sure she hadn’t missed one.

“This is for you girls. I’ve already worked it out with Lillian. She’s over the moon.” Will, satisfied that his gift had been unequivocally received, left the table to get the ice bucket.

“It’s not really cocktail hour yet,” she said, before she thought to say, “Thank you.”

It was not out of character for Will to bring home expensive gifts for no real occasion, and he had flown her to Paris to visit Lillian before, but this was the first time he came home early from work to present it and the first time he had purchased tickets for travel companions. She is sure he would have included Ruth, too, but the last time he tried to convince her to fly—he promised her all the tranquilizers she would need to survive the flight—she cried and asked him to promise to never buy her a ticket. Flora knew Ruth’s phobia was the main obstacle, but she also knew that she hated receiving lavish handouts from her brother-in-law—or maybe it was Carl who could not abide them.

“This is loverly, Will. Thank you. Bea will be beside herself.” They embraced in front of the open freezer door. Will finished the premature machinations of cocktail making and Flora went upstairs to remove her hair net and put on some proper clothes. She had the envelope of tickets in her hand and put them on the bathroom countertop as she unpinned and arranged her hair. It was clearly an apology, for the incident with Bea—or something more? That’s why Bea was included. And Abby was included to prevent envy and resentment. Was Will not joining them so that he could spend carefree time with his dark-haired mistress? The last thought was supplanted by the more definite issue of Abby and Flora traveling together for a week, likely sharing a hotel room, saying little, and feeling a lot.

“Are you sure you won’t want to join us?” Flora asked as they ate dinner that night. “Isn’t it a week you usually take off anyway?”

“That would be completely beside the point,” Will responded, still adopting the kindly and unfamiliar tone from two hours prior. She wondered how long he could maintain it. She knew how to needle him, but she made a conscious decision not to.

Flora stood outside the front door on a thick and leaden August morning in her housecoat and slippers, her recently set hair protected by a fine net. The quality of the light was the same as the day she got the phone call from her father that Delia had died. Toto turned around three times before depositing his business onto the sparkling white and gray stones that surrounded the great oak. As she stood from picking it up with a tissue, she saw Jan Levy speedily striding by, in a pale pink velour tracksuit, pumping her arms industriously. Jan waved without breaking her stride, like a mechanical doll, and Flora distractedly returned the wave with the hand holding the tissue and dog poo.

The sight of Jan reminded her, uneasily, of the book she had just finished reading. She read only some of the review of The War Between the Tates, put off by the cartoonish cover illustration—two simply drawn forearms with index fingers pointing at one another, one obviously female with its frilly pink cuff and the other male with its staid pin-striped one. In the first paragraph of the review, Flora learned that the fictionalized university around which the plot was constructed was modeled after Cornell, the place that, in retrospect, Flora privately wished she could call her alma mater. She had not even applied because it seemed overly ambitious and not a place she belonged, with its Ivy League status, gargantuan size, varied disciplinary schools, and brilliant men and women marching purposefully and heartily around the challenging hilly campus to and from their challenging classes. But now she thinks she would have benefited from that sort of baptism by fire, because even though it, like the small women’s college she ended up attending, was close to home, she likely would have lived in the dormitories on campus and would have become braver and more independent in a practice session for the adult life she imagined coming afterwards. As it was, she had never lived a day of her life on her own, moving from her childhood home to the one she lived in with her husband.

The idea of immersing herself in a simulated Cornell for a week was tempting, but just as she willfully avoided daydreaming about how she and her life might have turned out if she had attended Cornell, she was cautious about doing so. Even a few sentences of the review itself touched a nerve that, along with the inane cover, prevented her from finishing it. Why read the entire book that would only further press on the bruise? But when she saw it on the new books display at Scrivener’s the previous week, the cover, when right in front of her, seemed more whimsical than stupid. She decided to buy it, telling herself it was something to read on the plane to Paris.

“How do, Mrs. Rose?” Steve Levy had been at the cash register. “My mother loves Lurie. I think she’s right in the middle of this one. I’m sure she’d be glad to lend her copy if you don’t mind waiting another few days.”

“Honestly, Steve. You don’t want to put your own store out of business, do you?” Flora laughed. “I like buying books and having them in the bookcase afterwards. Like a trophy.” She immediately rued her exposed reading choice, as if Steve could detect all of the pathos attached to it.

She thought of the Jong book, which she read in secret for the three days it took her to finish it, and of its hiding place in her bottom bureau drawer with her neglected lingerie. If Will ever found it there, he would assume she was ashamed or embarrassed by reading “that book.” He could never be disabused of the prudish, neurotic character profile that he had already constructed for her anyway. Fine. Let him think whatever he wants.

Despite her plans to save the book for travel, once she peeked into the first chapter Flora read it, too, in three days. And just as she had embarked on Fear of Flying for dubious personal reasons without knowing what was in store, similarly Flora was surprised at much of what Alison Lurie and the Tates presented to her. It neither fed her desires nor stoked her envy with regard to Cornell. Any of the characterization of the university was more for the entertainment and schadenfreude of those on the faculty side rather than that of a student, unless the reader happened to be a student who had an affair with a married professor. Rather, the novel was largely about a philandering husband and a troubled family. This had the potential to inflame her far more, though somehow it didn’t. She only worried now that Steve Levy would have been apprised of the book’s premise by his mother, and Steve, who seemed astute enough to suss out the Roses’ Tolstoyan version of unhappiness if he wasn’t already privy to a firsthand account from Abby, would assume she bought the book to masochistically see her own self-important and erudite husband and disaffected offspring reflected in fictional form. She would probably hide this book in the lingerie drawer, too, in order to avoid any of its plot points coming up with Will or anyone visiting the house and seeing it in the bookcase.

Like Erica Jong, Alison Lurie couldn’t seem to avoid the cult of psychoanalysis. The protagonist, a sympathetic character with whom Flora nonetheless did not readily identify, despite their similar superficial circumstances, read an article that said women who married older men tended to identify closely, “even symbiotically,” with their children. It chafed that this text-within-a-text squared with what Will postulated about her and Abby. If he ever deigned to read the book or listen to her summarize this part, he would say, “Lurie’s proxy study has it right. You and Abby are like competitive sisters warring for my paternal attention.” How he managed to dispassionately reduce everything to a crude stick figure drawing within moments was a skill that she could not help but admire when she was able to look at it from a detached perspective.

What she retained from Lurie’s book would make for a stilted conversation with anyone since she had merely been sifting through the prose looking for unspecified nuggets. She was always paying attention to the wrong thing in movies and books, focusing on a side activity or a minor point and losing interest in the main gist. If Jan had asked Flora what she thought of the Lurie book, Flora would have to say she hadn’t started it yet. She couldn’t formulate even a sentence-long review in her own head to encapsulate what she thought of the book as a whole.