The guy was in my senior-year writing class, laughed the longest at the jokes I made to offset the sobriety on my pages. He took me out for the sort of date I’d had often. In his car, I teased him about his taste in music, and he teased me about the Cartier tank watch Patsy had given me for my twenty-first birthday. We would proceed from the restaurant to the movie, from the parking lot to my street, from invitation to sex on my fresh-sheeted bed in my one-bedroom apartment. But tonight I was derailed by his roommate, who appeared at the restaurant with friends and pulled a chair from a neighboring table to sit beside me and shake my hand.
“You!” he said. “I was supposed to meet you months ago. Your father told me to call you.” He explained the unlikely connection of mutual friends.
“I wish you had,” I said. I looked over at my date, his beaming pleasure. “Too late, I guess.”
“Shit,” Noah said, staring at me, and I was staring at him—the sophisticated Jewish lineage and deep-set dark eyes. The restaurant had turned loud because the belly dancer had started. We watched her flesh curving and rolling.
I leaned closer to Noah’s ear. “I wish I knew how to do that. It makes me want to go to bed just looking at it, with anyone, straightaway.” I’d knocked him off balance.
“You could take lessons.”
“I could,” I said. “I might.”
But first I went to Blue Velvet and then home with my date, back to my cleaned bathroom and dusted bedside table, diaphragm case within easy reach. I had to give him the repertoire, because I was good at it, and I liked doing what I was good at.
A few weeks later (the writing-class guy by now sort of a boyfriend, but Noah, the roommate, all I thought about) my sister came to visit. I drew a deep breath at the train station as I watched her come up the platform. Her body always changed, part maturity, part effort, and she was stiletto tall, a vampish stunner with a short black skirt, a very white T-shirt for contrast under a fashionably slouchy black jacket. She still wore the gold letter on a chain from the Famous Lyricist. The Penelope she presented never matched my Penelope, the memory of her soft tummy, little hand, tangled hair from sleep.
The four of us went out to dinner, and Penelope shifted her body in her restaurant chair so Noah could look at her. “Susy’s the one who always has relationships!” she said. I knew she looked beautiful, very beautiful, but I couldn’t see it. My scrutiny took in each element but not the entirety. Her irises blazed blue with special lenses. She tossed back her expensive bangs, and the earrings that glinted in her long, glossy hair were made of some enormous stone for dazzle and imitation. She was wearing boots of smooth, unmarked leather that hugged her leg to the knee, boots I could never borrow because of having big calves. “You got the Jewish legs,” my mother used to tell me. “Penelope has dancer’s legs.” I was wearing black tights and a houndstooth skirt, which had seemed stylish as I left the house, but her stockings, held around her thighs by some modern magic, cast a satin finish on her waxed legs, unassailable glamour.
Through dinner my sister cracked the unexpected remark, lanced the acute observation, and the men laughed hard with her mischief. It was her wit singeing the air as plates were cleared for dessert, my silence growing noticeable, huffy. I had my mother’s instinct for the emotional hum in a room, but my sister with her gift for the brilliant allusion and tart pun sounded like our father.
After the dinner, she went to Noah’s room while I followed my boyfriend to his. He put on Born to Run, as usual.
“You can’t have him anyway,” Penelope said the next day. We drove home. She smelled of Noah’s shampoo. “So what does it matter?”
I complained to my mother, who said, “You don’t have to have everything, you know, Sue. You’re the one who’s graduating college. You’ve got your own flat, a real relationship. You could give Penny a chance.”
A chance? She was nineteen, living in our old apartment in the city. She’d become the curator of our childhood, the photo albums, kitchen things, Rizzoli art books. She’d shrugged off college to take drama classes where famous actors dropped in. She went to matinees with our mother when Daphne was in town. Her friends threw her birthday parties, flew her to France, bought her Fendi bags and flamboyant coats. When I was with her in the city, she’d storm the teeming huddle of cosmetics counters at Bloomingdale’s, calling the sales staff by name. They’d give her double handfuls of samples, little zippered bags, cunning compacts. If they didn’t, she’d lean over the glass countertop and make the most of her little-girl longing. “Don’t you have something for me?” I could never look like that, move like that, pull any of it off, stuff I didn’t even care about when I was in Boston, but after a day out with her I’d go into her bathroom and contemplate stealing her Chanel lipsticks, the thirty-dollar hair clips. We were better on the phone, away from her collections and trophies. Nor did I have to smell her smoke, and she didn’t have to watch me disapprove as she lit up. She smoked a great deal, fond of couture lighters, heavy tokens of someone’s affection, Cartier gold, Tiffany.
My mother and I talked a lot about Penelope, phone calls between Boston and Dubai, where she lived “on the compound.”
“I’m so worried about her. She adores you, you know. You can help her.”
That was the other Penelope, easier for me to understand but just as exhausting, the insomniac who couldn’t fall asleep without the television loud for company, the one who called me at late hours and wept.
“What’s wrong?” I’d say, soothing.
The list was long, a thousand ways to worry about the world. The shantytowns, the earthquake victims, the shoot-out at the fast-food place. When Cary Grant died, she sobbed for an hour. I was in the middle of writing my thesis and took a break to lie on the couch. Now my arm was tired, my ear was tired. I needed to understand Satan in Paradise Lost, what he wanted so badly. Our mother had cried like that when John Lennon died, her desperate sobs so uncontrolled when I came to the dorm phone that I was terrified of what she was about to tell me.
“Penelope, please. Can you calm down? You didn’t know him.”
“But now,” Penelope gasped, “there will never be another Cary Grant movie, ever. And he was so wonderful! Wasn’t he, Sue?”
My mother told strangers I was going to Oxford in the fall, which was true, and that I was nearly a Rhodes Scholar, which was not. At my apartment before we left for the graduation ceremony she held out a slim box from my absent grandmother. I couldn’t reach it before she was whipping it back, unlatching it and lifting out pearls. Aunt Irene and Penelope watched. My mother buffed them between her fingers.
“Susy gets pearls?”
“You must always wear them against your skin,” my mother said. “Skin gives them their glow.” She dangled them close so that I pulled back my head, trying to focus. She was already turning me by the shoulders. She got my hair up off my neck, planted my hand against the hair to hold it up and thread the strand under my elbow. I could feel the pearls slide across my neck and drop into their weight as her fingers worked the clasp. She turned me, surveyed me, and I still hadn’t touched the present.
Because we had started out as a secret cheat, proud of our own crime, I didn’t bother at first about Noah’s gambling. He studied playwriting. He could quote long passages of Stoppard, Mamet. He knew musical theater history, and he noticed set design or architecture in unusual ways. I thought he was perfect for me, a record of my own education, the reward. After graduation he landed a tiny studio, and I camped out at Penelope’s before I left for Oxford. My mother was around. I wouldn’t let Noah sleep over, uneasy with their certain inspection, and we made love at his place in the humid afternoons, windows open, fan spinning, incessant noise of taxi doors and bus brakes. When I came home to change my mother asked what she always asked.
“What’s he like in bed? Penelope said he—”
“Fine,” I said, the single word, as short as possible.
“Does he like going down on you?”
“Please, Mummy.”
“I’m just asking. It’s important. Don’t act like it’s not important.”
“She’s going to make a pass at you,” I warned Noah. “Because you’re mine. Don’t let her sit next to you. She’s crazy.” I felt like I was talking to myself. We sat on the crosstown bus on our way to meet my mother, Central Park fleeting past. This was their first meeting.
“Calm down,” Noah said. “You’re the one who’s acting crazy.”
We got off the bus and started down Lexington to the Skyline. I caught his sleeve and said, “Let me go alone.” This had to be made to not happen. I thought of the first time she’d met Jason, my college boyfriend, the expensive Indian place she’d picked, inviting Aunt Irene and Penelope, too. She seated Jason next to her, me on her other side, and quite visibly she ran her hand over his leg. “This one’s got a hungry look,” she announced to the table, lechery slowing down her voice. “That’s what you are, Jason: hungry.”
“Noah, I’ll say you were sick.”
“No.” He was annoyed, kept walking. “Relax, Susanna. Nothing terrible’s going to happen.”
We went in, and my mother jumped up from a booth and hugged me, the world on pause. Then she put her hand out to Noah, looking somber.
“Sit across from me, you two,” she said. “I want to see how in love you are.” When the waiter came she told Noah to order.
Then she exclaimed, “But you don’t want a cheeseburger!”
“I do,” Noah said. “That’s what I get in coffee shops.”
My mother looked up at the waiter. “I, however, shall have the moussaka, Yannis. Efharisto.”
I ordered a club sandwich.
“Tell me the name of your last play,” she said. He did. “Good name. Has it been produced? We should get it produced. I’m very good at that sort of thing, I’m sure Sue’s told you.” She launched into the tale of the producing job, years ago, a large reliable salary, a limo to pick her up. She made it sound like a career, not just the six or eight weeks it had been. She told Noah that Judi Dench and Maggie Smith were friends, although they were actually Patsy’s friends. She told about sitting behind Samuel Beckett once at the theater. “I touched his coat.”
“What about Christopher Plummer?” I said, a little sour and adolescent.
“What about him?”
“When we went backstage?”
“When? In London?”
“No, here. He was in Othello.”
She said, “You did?”
“No, we did, remember?” This drove me crazy, having to rehearse for her her own theater. When Iago made his entrance she had squeezed my hand. We were in the second or third row, close enough to return his gaze, should it land on us. I watched the sweat streak his makeup instead of hearing the Shakespeare. As soon as the bows ended, she tugged me toward an exit door that led backstage to Plummer’s dressing room. She rapped on the door, said, “Chris?” She went in, and I was wondering if she’d known him in the sixties. “My daughter worships you. Sue, come on in, don’t be shy. He’s very nice.” The actor looked tired, the buoyant stage life gone out of him. We shook hands. She told him how smashing he’d been in the play. She told him who her father was, waiting that tiny pause for his reaction. “There!” she said as we headed out to catch a cab. “He was brilliant, wasn’t he? You shook his hand.” It was easy in those moments to feel her triumph. Her force and thrust made things matter that otherwise would have just passed by.
Noah and I left the restaurant with Daphne, dropped her off at the apartment and walked on. We came to a movie theater, its show a few minutes from beginning. I didn’t care what was playing. I needed to sit, regain the strength in my loose legs and calm my stomach.
“She’s a riot,” Noah said. “I don’t see what you’re so uptight about. She seems fine to me.”
I couldn’t explain. It had gone okay. Memory was a bully, shoving me into casting her as a fiend. “You’re not fair to her,” Penelope often said to me. “Mummy doesn’t stand a chance with you.”
Noah joked, “And how come she didn’t make a pass at me? I’m insulted!”
“How was I?” my mother said when I called. “I’m better, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’m really trying, Sue.”
“I know.” The prospect of being with her without drama or collision, without scandal and wasted energy, was tantalizing, melting on my tongue. I wanted it. A few days later we went to the Whitney, and she didn’t talk about my sex life or hers. She talked about the art, sort of. “Calder lived right down the block from us on Sullivan Street.” I felt myself ease up on her, release some of my vigilance. Let this be better. Let this be perfect was the unarticulated wish, the steady longing, the trap.
My father’s doctor took me aside. The MS was worse. “He has about another year.” I didn’t understand at first what he was trying to say.
When I told this to Noah, we had to decide something about us.
“I’m not going to go to Oxford,” I said. “This could be my last year with him.”
Noah didn’t say anything.
“Should we move in together?” I said. “Aren’t you glad I’m staying?”
He sank into his unmade futon and fell asleep. I couldn’t wake him. I sat on the chair and waited, thinking the nap wouldn’t last, but it was dark when I left his place.
I loved Noah, fiercely, because that’s the way I loved, convinced that my effort would make things be so, and he loved my ardent energy, my appetite for food and sex and friends. “You make things fun,” he told me, but he would disappear to a backgammon club upstairs above Seventy-second Street. Over and over, he was at the club. “I’m going to the club,” he said every afternoon, most evenings, and he left me behind like a classroom at the end of the day. I hated that I said, “Where were you?” when he came back to the studio three, four hours later than he’d told me, the cold Cuban food lined up on the kitchen counter. He made bets. He started to lie about betting, about losing, and when he lied his mouth went rigid and his lips didn’t look connected at the corners. After he lost, his sweat had an acidic tinge. I was so used to lying, I forgave him, wanting him to know that I planned to overlook this.
Knowing Noah lied to me made me want to catch him, made me want the upper hand. I become obsessed with accuracy, exact details with which to trace his day. I said things like “Well, what time did you get on the subway?”
“What should I do?” I asked my aunt on the phone. She’d had a ten-year marriage, extraordinary. She was four or five years into another relationship. She was the one to go to in these matters.
“He may need help,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be you, darling.”
“I know when he lies.”
“What do you want?”
“I want a real couch instead of a futon, and a tranquil relationship and time to write,” I told her. “I want to make a real relationship work, not a series of them.”
“Then you shall have it.”
I liked hearing her say that, but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe I’d get what I longed for.
I walked down Broadway, my breath tight and fast. I sank in against a building across from the club. Its window was bright with fluorescents, and (I imagined) the air inside was used up by the stink of cigars in greasy ashtrays, atop those tin receptacles you found in lobbies. Noah was fixed in the same spot every time, visible from the street, same shoddy chair. He bent his head to the backgammon board. I didn’t want to kiss him anymore. His partner assumed the same pose. They slumped, they rolled the dice, they waited.
Part of me felt vindicated. You lied! I had a right to my troubles. But part of me leapt with the cinematic adventure, the narrative train speeding along.
“I’ve caught you! I’ve watched you! In the rain, you should know, and it was cold. I stood there for two hours!”
“Why?” Noah asked me. “It’s your problem, then, if you knew where I was. Why would you waste your time doing that?”
“Could we go to one of these?” I held out the list I’d made of Gam-Anon meetings.
“Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” he said. “Go by yourself.”
I had started a job, a prized internship at a political magazine. My father knew the editor, invited him to drinks. I was the only intern who socialized with the editor. I stayed at my father’s after the editor left, and we talked about the history of the magazine. I loved having a job, my desk phone, loved the toasted bagels in white deli paper, loved lunch, and flirting, and things in alphabetical order. Each week I ratcheted up the flirting with colleagues, taking comfort in success. I could make it go as far as I wanted.
“How awful,” I said to Nick in the fact-checking department. He was telling me about his breakup. “But now you can order what you want on the Chinese menu, yes? And you got the apartment. Do you like it? Where is it? Will you take me?” I thought I was stealthy. And anyway it worked. Nick brought me to his building, and I grabbed the back of his shirt on the stairs and made him kiss me, threw myself into that kiss because Nick didn’t gamble, didn’t smell like panic, didn’t talk about sports.
“Where’d you learn to kiss like that?” he said.
“It’s not learned,” I said through mouth, teeth, tongue. “Instinct.”
His one-bedroom was hollowed out by the absence of the furniture his ex-girlfriend had taken. He took his time in the kitchen. A bottle cap hit the Formica, and I came in, and we ignored the beer, just great, hungry kissing that was filling up every little space in me. In the kitchen it was playful. In the living room we had to choose—sit, stand, lie down? And in the unlit hallway he pushed me into the wall, and I pushed him. By the time we were shoeless and standing next to his dark, unmade bed, our kissing was informed, familiar, pointing directly at fucking. Fine. I didn’t feel unfaithful. I felt alive, inflamed. Later he walked me to the corner and hailed the cab, which hurried me home, damp air through the rolled-down window, breezing hair into my face as I thought up lies, satisfied they’d be good.
“Did Noah notice?” Penelope said on the phone the next morning. I was at my office desk, preparing for the moment Nick arrived. Think of the secret glances, the sudden conspiracy between us.
“How would Noah notice?” I said. “He came home after me, and this morning he was making notes on the sports page.”
“So how was he? The fact-checker?”
I told her all about him. And the freelancer? How was he? His place was so close to the magazine I walked in the opposite direction and around the block and came at it from the other way. He kept a bottle of San Pellegrino by the bed, two glasses. In the copy department: that one lived in Hoboken, where the avenues on a Saturday afternoon seemed too wide to contain me safely. I felt exposed as I followed the directions from the PATH train, written in a copyeditor’s regimented hand. His tiny room was stacked with books about anarchy. The window looked down a sunless air shaft dotted with pigeon shit. Everything reminded me I was here to go to bed with someone who was not the person lying to me. I took off my clothes, and the editor took off his, and Noah was at the club, holding off losing, betting bigger, then losing. Noah was at the club, at the club. I called up Jason from college. Dialing him I’d get turned on, our old voices, our understanding. He was the animal in me, the ready partner. Later I would use specifics: a drink at the Gramercy Tavern; the late aerobics class. Noah countered with his version of his evenings, similar belabored lies, and we settled into a kind of harmony, its own reality so compelling I wondered if I should marry him.
“How many is that now?” Penelope asked me at lunch. She could list everyone I’d kissed and slept with.
“Six?” I said.
“Eight, I think. Tell me when it gets to ten.” I needed a record keeper. My numbers were pretty high.
“What about the gambling?” she said. “Has he admitted it yet?”
“No. He says he doesn’t have a problem.” We looked at each other. “Well, maybe it’s not really a problem, maybe I do focus on it too much. Although it’s annoying, about the money. Either he never has any or he has three grand in cash. I can’t even try talking to him when a game’s on.”
“Don’t they have meetings?”
“I tried that. No dice.”
“Nice one,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
But I had no plan. I only knew how to keep track. “Fuck him,” I said.
“I think we should get married,” I told Irene, pretending Noah was gambling less.
She said, “This is about your father, because he’s sick. Don’t do it.” I had expected her to say that, so it was a comfort. “You’re only twenty-two, Susy.”
“Look at my mother. She was sixteen. I’m long past waiting.”
“Darling, look. You know I’ll be here for you.”
“We can go to Bergdorf’s and look at wedding dresses!” I said. “You know those private fittings, where they bring you the dress?”
“That’s a small fortune.”
“No, no, I don’t want to buy the dress there. I just want the frilly pretend. Would you go with me?”
“Of course, my love,” my aunt said. “Anything.”
I took Noah out to dinner. It was a sticky, end-of-summer night, the French restaurant on a corner. We sat outside. Talk was difficult as traffic clattered past. My stomach in a knot, I wrote on a piece of paper “Will you marry me?” and pushed it across to him.
He looked less than surprised. “Yeah, sure.”
I expected a different mood to infuse the evening, make the subway ride festive, bless our bed beneath the beleaguered air conditioner, but things stayed as they were.
“And you proposed!” my mother said at her place the next day. “My little bride. Let’s get some champagne!” She skipped into the kitchen—her back okay—and opened the fridge. I knew this mood. It was the Big Everything frenzy, the Let’s-Take-Over-Central-Park mood. She toasted Noah. “Now I have to like you. Only kidding, Sue.”
I bought paperbacks on wedding planning and made appointments around the city to look at spaces, prissy, controlled rooms big enough for a hundred, for two hundred. Hotel ballrooms, restaurants you could take over, somebody’s loft. Noah would meet me there, his shoulders forward, ready to turn everything down. We met with the caterer, turning the pages of his portfolio as he wrote down “marinated beef skewers” in a flying script that conveyed supreme busyness. In the evenings I listened to tapes sent to us by swing quintets.
Aunt Irene and I went to Bergdorf’s, an appointed hour in the bridal department. We wouldn’t buy anything, spend those many thousands of dollars, but I wanted the gesture of debutant entitlement, and my aunt and I giggled and trilled when the trim sales-woman left the private room for the thousand-dollar headpiece. I was standing on a platform, embraced by mirrors, beautiful white me everywhere and in the center, lots of my aunt behind me. How ferocious my desire was to be bride, to have everything be especially about me.
Daphne and Irene took me to Gino’s to celebrate, the three of us in an easy knot in the small foyer, peeling off coats and bags. We kept holding celebrations, celebration drinks, celebration breakfasts, celebration strolls. Penelope got there. She stopped at the coat check counter, talked a few minutes intently, then very big laughter. We had a square table by the wall.
“You could never be faithful, Sue,” my mother said. “You’re not cut out for it.”
“How long have you ever been faithful?” Penelope said.
“You’re so young still,” Irene said.
“Well, what about me?” my mother said. “I was young. Of course, I married a bastard. But if anyone can handle it, Sue can. She handles things.”
“How come Susy gets to get married?”
The waiter, ancient and impatient, retrieved his pad from a back pocket. We each ordered paglia e fieno al segreto in a strong accent.
“You’ve already had six affairs,” Penelope said.
My mother said, “You won’t be happy in bed.”
“There’s more than sex,” I said.
“What?” she demanded.
“He’s very smart. No one else talks about Paradise Lost with me. We discuss things, theater, dance. I don’t know. He’s funny.”
“He’s funny? I never see him smile, let alone laugh. And your father was exceedingly smart, but did that make him a joy to be married to?”
“Noah reminds me of your father,” Irene said. “He even looks like him.”
“I know,” I said. It was embarrassing, sort of obvious.
Irene said, “Noah gives Susy the intellectual validation she’s always trying to get from Nat.”
“I guess there’s more than sex,” Daphne said.
“Ah,” Irene said, rolling her eyes at me. “Though he does adore Susy.”
Irene never talked about sex, which gave her this sphinxlike presence in our midst. When my mother was in a bad mood she’d call Irene repressed. The manager paused to say hello, his hand on the back of my mother’s chair. She arched to look up at him.
“Susy’s engaged! Isn’t it amazing! And you’ve known her since she was this big!” The manager and I looked blank. When I came to Gino’s without my mother, no one knew me. He congratulated us in Italian and passed on to a table of well-dressed men.
“Well, here’s to Noah,” my mother said. “A good first husband.”
“That’s not very supportive,” I said.
“There goes Sue sulking,” she said. “Never mind, darling. You’ll have a beautiful baby.”
“Where are you going to get your dress?” Penelope said. “Vera Wang?”
“Yes, good,” said my mother. “That’s close to the apartment.”
Penelope sat up straighter. “Can I come?”
Irene and I had agreed not to let on about our Bergdorf’s date, sidestepping my mother’s competitive streak, and I knew not to mention the trips to thrift shops with my stepmother, who wanted me to marry in something vintage.
“Kleinfeld, I think.”
“What is Kleinfeld?”
“It’s like an outlet. It’s in Brooklyn.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I suppose Nat’s not going to kick in,” said Penelope. “As it were.”
“I got married in a pink suit.”
“We know.”
One night I woke to the phone ringing. Noah and I had moved into a two-bedroom, but he wasn’t there. He was at the club. It was Penelope, and she sounded careful.
“You have to wake up, Susy. I have to tell you something.”
“Okay.” I thought she needed to talk.
“Dr. Crawford got cancer, and he’s going to die.” Wyatt barely intruded anymore, an epic whose disaster had faded. Penelope said, “He’s really sick.”
“He’s going to die?” No. No, no, no, not that piece of my life gone. First deep love, first of everything. He gave me Shakespeare. He had to stay.
Penelope had heard from old friends. The school was in an uproar. “I wanted to be the one to tell you, Sissy Su,” she said. “Do you want me to come over?”
“No. Thank you.” She could rally with the most giving comforts, but I wanted to lie on my back and project every memory of him onto the ceiling. The next day I wrote him a letter. I didn’t want to console him, and I didn’t want to say what other people said. Noah, who treated the subject as petty, thought I was making too much of it. I thought about the words a long time. “Dear Wyatt, Although I never planned to speak to you again, I cannot imagine a world without you in it.” I resisted the impulse to tell him of my honors and successes. I spent a long time on the signature because I couldn’t decide between much love, with love, your, yours, or just Susanna. I settled on love, Susanna, and it wasn’t a lie. It felt scary to write his address down, as if my hand and pen would pull me to the stone walkway we used to hurry on. I just needed to say good-bye, but when he didn’t answer me I was furious. Didn’t he need to account for me, as he finished his life?
Wyatt had time to prepare the funeral, radon infecting him, his cancerous lungs on their long way out. When he died, not too many weeks later, he delivered his own eulogy, and his tape-recording instructed the mourners to go home afterward and read Plath. I heard from friends that everyone wondered where I was. “They were always so close,” they’d said. “She was his favorite, wasn’t she?”
Everyone said it was a terrible death. The house killed him, the pervasive toxin, the floor of his house, its dusty treachery muffled by the worn brown rug beneath us, hiding my errant hairs, her dropped contact lens, spatters of dried wine, a thin smear between our fucking and his death.
“We know where you’ll buy Susy her ring,” my mother told Noah. She didn’t add that she and I had spent the morning in the Carnegie Hill antique jewelers, where we’d already instructed the owner (“I’ve known him for ages. He’s always been in love with me”) to sell this very ring to Noah when he came in, the Victorian setting, the pretty little diamond, the two sweet rubies. “Noah doesn’t know your taste,” my mother said. “I know your taste. Didn’t I give you those?” She fingered my earring, a small blue pearl set in antique gold. She had me show it to the owner as she held back my hair. “And doesn’t she have divine ears?”
“This, too,” I said, holding up my wrist for him so he could see the thin simple gold bangle. She’d given me all the jewelry I loved best.
Noah was lying on the futon couch staring at a football game. I made myself not ask if he’d bet on the spread. I didn’t want to fight that fight, nor have to see his threadbare sweatpants.
“There’s something wrong with the toilet,” he said, eyes on the TV. “You should check it out.” I opened the bathroom door and saw a red velvet box sitting in the center of the closed toilet lid. My mother was right. Noah understood nothing of our ways.
Noah didn’t stop gambling, and I didn’t stop sleeping with other people. A couple of months before the wedding date I forfeited my thousand-dollar deposit on the dress and left him, and he said, as we surveyed our rugs and records, dishes, books, “You can keep that fucking ring I was forced to buy you.” I hadn’t planned to return it. When I looked at my hand I remembered leaning with my mother over the velvet trays, then having lunch together at the Russian Tea Room.