“David?”
The voice was tentative, but he recognized it immediately. He felt a strange grip of panic, assuming she could only be calling after all these years with bad news. He cleared his throat, and managed a raspy, “Julie!”
“Did I wake you?”
“No, no,” he said, appalled at the idea. He’d been raised by a mother who believed that sleeping was suspect behavior, more shameful than alcoholism and compulsive gambling, two things about which the dear woman had known a lot. It was one of the few beliefs in her Italian and Catholic ideology that had left an imprint. “It’s only four in the afternoon,” he said.
“Oh? Oh, right, the time difference.” She said it dismissively, as if it was an annoyance, and David felt an unexpected throb of affection. Julie had always been bad with time zones and directions and dates. He sympathized with her annoyance; he’d grown up in Rhode Island, and despite having lived in San Francisco for twenty years, he still considered East Coast time the real time and everything else irritating rebelliousness.
“I know you don’t like to admit to sleeping,” she said.
“I’m flattered you remember,” he said.
“I remember a lot.”
“In that case, I’m flattered you called.”
“Don’t be—I’ve forgotten a lot, too.”
He saw Julie as she was the last time he’d seen her, a slim young woman with a love of white shirts and gray men’s pants she ordered by the half-dozen from some utilitarian catalog and wore with enough conviction to make them unexpectedly sexy and chic. She’d kept her hair long in a casually nondescript way and spent money on presents for people she barely knew. She’d had muddled plans to become an illustrator or a graphic designer, plans that were constantly derailed by an inability to stick to one thing for long. She’d had the misfortune of being talented and capable in many areas without being expert in any of them. This, he’d noted, makes one interesting when young but usually, when middle-aged, disappointed. Or a teacher.
Back then, she’d made resolutions and broke them within the hour, started projects and left them unfinished. Those were the traits that had endeared her to David and made him want to fix things for her. His desire to be helpful was one he’d naïvely mistaken for lust back when he was less resolved about his sexual leanings, just as, years later when he was more resolved, he’d mistaken lust for affection, admiration, and even love. He and Julie had lived together in New York on the Upper West Side for more than two years and had been married for less than one.
“You must be shocked to hear from me,” she said.
“I was at first, but I got over it quickly. Now I’m in the delighted phase.” This was true. Her voice brought him back to a time in his life when the real estate news he’d just received would have been an upsetting inconvenience rather than a crisis. “Why did we fall off?”
“I think it had to do with the fact that one day we were supposedly in love and married and then, suddenly, we weren’t either.”
“I guess that will do it. And then,” he added, a mild attempt at self-defense, “you remarried.”
“Me and my marriages. Some people never learn.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Oh, god, David. You don’t think I’d call after all this time just because something’s wrong, do you?”
That seemed like the most logical explanation, but he said, “I was just making sure.”
“Good.”
Having cleared this up, she started to cry.
David had reached the point in midlife at which he’d grown used to hearing friends burst into tears for reasons both personal and global or for no apparent reason at all. He made his way into the kitchen of the carriage house and started a pot of tea. It was unlikely this would be a short conversation.
“Do you remember those singers you used to play all the time?” she asked. “The French ones with the delicate voices? Do you still listen to them?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Although I think you may have ended up with most of the records.”
“My daughter found them recently and started playing them.”
He was beginning to understand why she’d called. “The past came flooding back on a tide of Jacques Prévert?”
“Something like that. They made me miss you. Not the marriage. I mean our friendship. I guess I’m in need of a friend.”
He was taken aback by something in her voice as she said this, a sad, wistful quality that had always gotten to him in the past. Although his sexual preference had been for men for decades (his entire life if you included a few crucial years when he’d been in denial about the obvious), he’d always found it easier to feel protective of and affectionate toward women, possibly because underneath it all, he knew he was incapable of giving himself to them fully. The reason he’d been so open toward Soren for five years was because, underneath it all, he’d known that Soren was incapable of giving himself fully to anyone.
“I miss you, too,” he said.
“I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t say that unless you didn’t mean it.”
“But in this case, I do mean it. I’m more earnest and less skinny these days, both signs of aging, I’ve been told. I often think about those walks we used to take along Riverside Drive.”
“At a certain point, it was easier than being in the apartment together.”
“Yes, but they were still wonderful. All that gray water and granite, the low skies.”
“Another way of saying there was always a cloud hanging over our heads,” she said.
“I suppose. But as I recall, neither one of us was big on the sun.”
They lapsed into reminiscences of people they’d known all those years ago and Oliver, the neighbor’s sickly dog they’d adopted and had seen through to his death. He was the only dog David had ever lived with, and losing him had been part of the tumble of losses that had come at the end of their relationship. As the least personal, it was the easiest one to discuss now. Julie mentioned her teaching job and told David she was running an “informal B and B” out of her house. He thought it was best not to press for details on this. “Informal” probably meant “illegal.” After another fifteen minutes, the conversation began to feel like one in which they were talking around something.
“I get the feeling,” he said, “that there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“That goes without saying, don’t you think?”
“We have to get to it eventually.”
“It’s a favor,” she said.
“That goes without saying, too. And I love feeling useful.”
She hesitated, and he sensed she was calculating how much to reveal. “My daughter’s a junior in high school,” she said. “She needs help with colleges.”
He was thrilled. After all this time, he really could be useful to dear Julie. But after talking for a few more minutes, he realized he was hearing only part of the problem.