With Josh it took longer. When he was just three he lost the top part of his right index finger when Benjamin inadvertently slammed a car door on it. He had a series of operations to make it look neater and it never seemed to hinder him in his writing or drawing or anything else. But it made him even more self-conscious and shy. He found school hard and was slow to make friends and had Abbie not been at hand to protect him, he might well have fallen prey to bullies. But though constantly in his sister’s shadow, gradually he grew stronger and more confident, his asthma attacks less severe. He was a sensitive and loving child but with a kind of dogged resilience, doubtless born of so much early suffering. Benjamin, of course, never forgave himself for the accident, even after Josh started joking about it, holding up two fingers and saying in a dopey hippie voice Almost peace, man, which became a sort of private family greeting and farewell.
The price for shepherding her son through his tribulations—though she refused to so construe it—was Sarah’s career. She had let it dwindle and the phone had finally stopped ringing. And when he was at last happy and healthy and secure and she started making calls herself, she found the world had moved on. Television had become even more ruthlessly commercial and nobody seemed much interested in the kind of films she had made. Nor were they strictly even films anymore. A whole new technology had taken over. Everyone was shooting documentaries on lightweight video; cutting rooms had junked the old Steenbeck machines and gone electronic. It wouldn’t have taken Sarah long to learn how to adapt. But something held her back, a feeling that her life had moved on and that perhaps she should try something new.
It was Benjamin who came up with it. Arriving home one evening, he mentioned casually that he had just seen a For Sale sign outside the local bookstore. It wasn’t the most inspiring of places and though Sarah, along with many friends and neighbors, used it out of loyalty, everyone moaned about the woman who owned it, how unimaginative, inept, and sometimes downright rude she was. Running her own bookstore had always been one of Sarah’s fantasies, but until Benjamin suggested they buy it, she had always thought of it in much the same way that he had once dreamed of being Paul Newman.
“We can’t afford it,” she said.
“We can.”
“I wouldn’t know how to do it.”
“You know darned well you’d be brilliant at it.”
And she was. Within three years she had turned Village Books around and started to make a modest profit. She had Benjamin design an extension at the back and, long before anybody else was doing it, made it look like a den with floor lamps and comfy leather sofas and a little bar where you could get coffee and soda and homemade cookies. She turned one corner into a children’s area with toys and a low table where they could sit and read or doodle with crayons. She set up new and quicker ordering systems and shamelessly used her old contacts, flattering and begging any writer she could think of to come and talk and sell a few books.
Benjamin and Martin, meanwhile, went from strength to strength. In the derelict downtown bakery that they had converted into a state-of-the-art studio, they now employed more than fifty people. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, and without any formal decision ever being taken, Benjamin now ran the business while Martin was its driving creative force. And though Benjamin wasn’t altogether happy about this division of their labors and felt his fingers itch at the sight of some new design taking shape on the drawing board, he acknowledged that things seemed to work best this way.
“He’s the genius and I’m the fixer,” he would say.
And though Sarah would always contradict this, not just because she sensed he wanted her to but because she had always hoped that one day he would be a great architect, she came to accept that he was right. He was more an editor than a creator. If you showed him something, be it the draft of a letter or a newspaper ad for the bookstore or the design for some sensational new building that Martin was working on, he could immediately spot the weak points and know how to improve them. It was a rare talent but one he didn’t seem to value in himself. Now and again, just to keep his eye in, he would become more hands-on with a project or even design something himself. And when this happened, Sarah saw the change in him, in his spirits and his energy, how it seemed to galvanize and brighten him.
He was the finest father to Abbie and Josh that she could ever have wanted. Whether it was helping with math homework or shooting hoops in the yard, ferrying them around town to violin lessons or Little League or dressing up as Dracula to entertain twenty kids at Halloween, he was always there for them. Sometimes, particularly during those three years when she was working long hours trying to turn the bookstore around and hadn’t yet hired Jeffrey to help, Benjamin probably saw more of them than she did. She even found herself getting a little jealous when they turned to him for help with something rather than to her.
Her friends were always saying how great he was, how much more he did than their husbands, how lucky Sarah was to have him. But the remark that would always stick in her mind came from Iris. She and her stockbroker husband, Leo—who, when he wasn’t working, seemed to spend most of his time on the golf course—lived in Pittsburgh, though in a neighborhood much classier than the one where she grew up. Iris had gone into journalism and was now an assistant editor on the Post-Gazette. A couple of times a year, with their three rowdy children but no Leo, she would fly to New York for a long weekend with the Coopers.
During one such visit, on a sunny Saturday morning, the two women were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and catching up on news, while Benjamin, who had already cooked breakfast for everybody, stacked the dishwasher, sorted the laundry, compiled (without any reference to Sarah) a grocery list, then cheerily packed all five kids into the car and headed off to the mall.
“Isn’t that a little spooky?” Iris said.
“What?”
“He does everything. He knows everything. Men aren’t supposed to know how much butter there is in the fridge. I bet he even knows the kids’ shoe sizes.”
“He does.”
“And their friends’ phone numbers?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Leo doesn’t even know their names. Does Ben know your dress size?”
“Yes.”
“Your bra size?”
“I hate shopping. He buys most of my clothes.”
“Does he know when your period’s due?”
“Iris—”
“Does he?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not natural.”
“Iris, for heaven’s sake, it’s not the nineteen-fifties.”
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic—well, some of it—but it’s not natural.”
Not quite in the next breath, but soon enough afterward for it to be apparent that there was a connecting thought, she went on to tell Sarah something she had heard from a friend of hers in Pittsburgh, a hotshot divorce lawyer.
The gist of it was that there were two types of men who absconded from their marriages: the naughty and the needy. The naughty absconder was a simple, dick-driven creature who just couldn’t help himself. However much he might love his family, it always came second to his main object in life, namely, chasing women. The needy absconder was basically insecure and forever trying to prove to himself how much everybody loved him. His family was, in effect, one big love machine that needed his constant control and attention. When his kids grew older and got lives of their own and didn’t need him so much, he suddenly got scared and felt old and useless. So he ran off to look for a new love machine someplace else.
Iris relayed all this more as a joke than as a serious piece of social observation. But for days afterward, Sarah found herself thinking about it. And the more she did, the angrier she became at the implication.
She and Benjamin were happier than almost any couple she knew. Okay, maybe he was a little too fastidious, ever the architect. Everything in life had to be in the right place, at the appropriate angle, all balanced and neat an
d no rough edges. And she had to admit, he was a little needy. He liked to be liked. But didn’t most men?
The idea of his being the sort who suddenly upped and left, if this was indeed what Iris had been suggesting (though, even as the thought occurred, Sarah was aware she was probably being a little paranoid here), was preposterous. They loved and trusted each other. And even though their sex life wasn’t as exciting as he wanted and had for a long time been a source of some tension between them, she had never, not once in all the years they had been married, suspected him of cheating on her. He just wasn’t the type. Any more than she was.
And in just about every other department, they were great together. Weren’t they? So many wives and mothers were always going on about how dreadful their husbands were, how selfish and boorish and uncommunicative they were. But Sarah had never felt that way. She and Benjamin had always talked. About the people they knew, about their work, about all kinds of things. Mostly, of course, about Abbie and Josh. About their progress and problems and hopes, their triumphs at school, their disappointments. Their children were, she was proud to say, the center of their universe. Thank God they were. Surely, bringing up kids and doing all you could to make them happy and secure and fit for life was what marriage was all about. Could anything be more important?
Only much later, when the children were well into their teens and Sarah was starting to look forward to all the things she and Benjamin would soon be able to do, the places they would travel to, just the two of them, did she notice the shadow that sometimes seemed to fall on him. She would catch him staring at her or into the distance with a look of such desolation that she would think something terrible had happened, that he was about to tell her he had cancer or somebody they loved had died. She would ask him if he was all right and he would click on a smile and say of course he was, why?
On their wedding day, her father’s older sister had taken Sarah aside and, with a quiet intensity, vouchsafed some advice. Elizabeth had always been her favorite aunt and had once been a renowned society beauty. She had never had children and had enjoyed what the family referred to as a “colorful” life, which Sarah later realized was code for sleeping around. At the time, Elizabeth was on her third marriage (and subsequently died just after her fourth), so Sarah thought it both mildly amusing and a bit rich that she should presume to proffer guidance.
“Look after each other,” she confided.
It wasn’t exactly earth-shattering, but Sarah smiled politely and said of course they would. Elizabeth shook her head impatiently.
“No, you don’t understand. Look after each other. As a couple. When you have kids, you’ll want to put them first. Don’t. Marriage is like a plant. To keep it alive you’ve got to water it and feed it. If you don’t, when the kids are gone, you’ll look in the corner and it’ll be dead.”
ELEVEN
Eve had never consciously intended to keep her promise to call the Coopers. And even after she had done so, she was reluctant to analyze her motives. With all the hurt that was soon to be unleashed, she didn’t like to think of herself as the initiator. She preferred instead to believe it was all a matter of destiny. If not then and by those means, fate would doubtless have found some other way to bring her and Ben Cooper together.
During that week at The Divide she and Lori had become everybody’s new best friends and Eve had been touched by the warmth of their welcome. Sarah, in particular, had sought to involve them from the start. Eve liked her well enough, but no more so than any of the other women. She was interesting and witty and clearly very bright, but there was a slightly stiff quality, not grand or superior, just a little cool and inaccessible. She gave the impression that even if you were marooned for ten years with her on a desert island, you probably wouldn’t get to discover who she really was. But there was something about her husband to which Eve had felt herself curiously attracted.
It wasn’t by any means immediate. In fact, at first, among all those new faces at the ranch, she hadn’t really paid him much attention. He was one of the more interesting and artistic men there, for sure. She liked his sardonic take on life and how he asked questions about Pablo and about her work and her life in Santa Fe. And he actually seemed interested in the answers. But as the week progressed, even though she probably talked seriously with him on only two or three occasions, she began to sense a curious rapport.
In a group, when that Bradstock man or someone else was holding forth, she and Ben would catch each other’s eye, exchange a wry smile. They had talked a lot about painting and there was no doubt that she was flattered by his interest in her work. What had touched her, however, she later realized, was his sadness.
But he was married. How happily, she couldn’t say, but it made no difference. He was out of bounds. Eve had always been strict about avoiding romantic entanglements with married men. Not so much from any moral scruple but rather because she knew from the experiences of several friends that it almost always ended in tears.
On the wall above the phone in her Santa Fe kitchen was a cork pinboard, a cluttered collage of obsolete notes and grocery lists, photos and postcards, along with Pablo’s latest (and, naturally, brilliant) finger paintings. Among this chaos, which Eve never quite got around to tidying, was the invitation to the opening of her friend William’s exhibition. It was at an important SoHo gallery, his first big one-man show, and he was a jangle of nerves, calling Eve almost every day for moral support. Pinned next to the invitation was the scrap of paper on which Sarah had written the Coopers’ phone number. And one morning, in mid-July, after William had called, Eve caught sight of it and stared at it for a moment, then picked up the phone and dialed it.
It was Sarah who answered. And she sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her. After further consultation, during which Eve for no good reason found herself again pretending that she liked musicals, four tickets were duly booked for Kiss Me, Kate (four, because William, who really did love musicals, insisted on being Eve’s date). A table was reserved for afterward at a place on Madison called La Goulue, which Eve didn’t know but Sarah said she would adore.
When Eve’s cab pulled up in front of the theater and she saw Ben Cooper waiting outside, sheltering from the rain with many others under the glare of the lights, she assumed Sarah must already have gone inside or had yet to arrive. She suddenly felt shy and almost asked the driver to go on and circle the block but people were clamoring for the cab so she paid and got out. She had no umbrella and so hopped as fast as she could through the puddles but still got drenched.
He didn’t see her until she was close beside him, and when he turned and saw her, his face broke from a harassed frown to a smile so warm and welcoming that something turned over inside her. They tried to kiss each other on the cheek but both went for the same side so that their faces collided and they almost kissed on the lips instead. They joked about the rain and the traffic and then she told him she was sorry, but William wasn’t with her. A big German dealer had breezed into the gallery just before it closed and said he wanted to buy the whole show.
“I would have called but it was too late.”
“We wanted to call you too but Sarah couldn’t find your cell number.”
“Is she inside or . . . ?”
“She couldn’t make it either. Some pain-in-the-ass author who was supposed to be doing an event tomorrow night at the bookstore just pulled out. She’s got a hundred people coming and nobody to talk to them. So now she’s melting the phones trying to find somebody else. I can’t tell you how mad she is. She was so looking forward to seeing you.”
So it was to be just the two of them. And though they both went through the motions of asking each other if they should call the whole thing off and go their separate ways, it was clear neither of them wanted to. There were people waiting in line for returns and Ben handed the two spare tickets to a young couple and wouldn’t allow them to pay him.
The show was wonderful. How could she have ever thought she didn’t like m
usicals? They came out exhilarated, both saying they hadn’t realized where all those famous songs came from. It was still raining but somehow they managed to find a cab. Again they acted out the routine of asking each other if they should call it a day and go home. But, of course, they didn’t. Sitting next to him in the cramped backseat of the cab on their way uptown to the restaurant, laughing and talking about the show, their legs touching and neither of them making any effort to move, she thought how handsome he looked and how good he smelled and then sharply told herself off.
The restaurant was crowded and they sat crammed in a corner next to a young couple who, somewhat disconcertingly, couldn’t keep their hands or lips off each other. More by accident than design, Eve was wearing the same green dress she had worn on the night of Benjamin’s birthday party. She thought how smart and different he looked in his black polo shirt and flecked charcoal jacket.
“Why does everybody in New York wear black?” she said.
“Maybe we’re all in mourning.”
“For what?”
“Our lost innocence.”
They ordered steak and salad and a delicious bottle of Margaux. He asked her how Pablo was and she ended up telling him all about the boy’s father, Raoul, and how they had never really been a conventional kind of couple, more just good friends who made the mistake of becoming lovers. Though, given that the result was Pablo, she said it was without a doubt the best mistake of her life.
Then it was his turn to answer questions. She asked him about Abbie and Josh and this led to a long discussion about parenting and their own parents. Eve told him hers were still more or less happily married and lived in San Diego, a place she didn’t much care for. Ben talked about his father and how they had never managed to get along.
“He thought I was an arrogant sonofabitch and he was probably right. I was. It’s nearly fifteen years since he died and I’ve only just made peace with him. It’s funny how these things go through phases. At first I was angry with him. I used to go on about how he never loved me and always criticized me. I actually really hated him for a while. Then, somehow, that passed and I just felt sad. And kind of cheated, you know? That we were never able to find each other. And now, it’s funny, but I can honestly say I love him. And I know, in his own way, he loved me too. He just belonged to a different generation. Men weren’t supposed to show their feelings like we do today. And he was so great with Abbie when she was a baby. He absolutely adored her. Used to sit her on his knee and tell her stories. So sweet and tender. I’d never seen him like that. It was like he was trying to give her the love he hadn’t been able to show me.”